How much gory detail do we need the Iraq war inquiry to publish? - good read

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/22/how-much-detail-iraq-war-inquiry-publish
<snip>
That Iraq was grand folly is now a truism. It was war declared on a foreign state on the basis of mendacious information. A cabal of rightwing American fanatics around Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld persuaded a once non-interventionist Bush to go to war. Drunk on the Afghan "mission accomplished", he agreed.

That a Labour Britain should go along with them was not so much outrageous as bizarre. Some diplomatic support was useful to America, but the sending of military assistance was trivial and insignificant. Blair, who had tried to curb US belligerence after 9/11, suddenly craved the approval of the macho hawks around Bush. "With you all the way, George," was the leitmotif of his dealings with Washington at the time.

As far as Britain was concerned, Iraq was Blair's war. But he is now a tragi-comic figure, touring luxury hotels and touting for business from dictators, droning on that he is "glad I got rid of Saddam". He will never show the slightest remorse. Chilcot offered one moment of black theatre when Blair declared his innocence and fled sweating from the inquiry room protected by detectives from a cursing audience.

The real scandal of Britain-in-Iraq was the pusillanimity of Blair's cabinet, most of whom have since pretended they really opposed the war, claiming to have been browbeaten by Alastair Campbell's Mephistophelean warmongering. Only the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, resigned, while the Commons roared off to battle on a lie. An entire political class played lickspittle to American neoimperialism. At a cost of a trillion dollars, a quarter of a million Iraqis died, along with 179 British soldiers.

The war turned a nasty, stable dictatorship that killed people into a nasty, unstable one that killed far more. The lessons of Iraq are rehearsed over and over again, some learned, some not. Iraq did play a part in the Commons voting against Cameron's eagerness for war with Syria last August.

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And strangely Robin Cook 'died'

[bemildred]

1. "The war turned a nasty, stable dictatorship that killed people into a nasty, unstable one that

killed far more."

Word. War does not fix things. war destoys things.

[Leme]

2. this OP is from an article

discussing the release ( or non-release) of British study of the Iraq war. Apparently one has been "finished" for some years and not released.
-
Not a bad read.