I supported the war in 2003 and I still do. Imagine if we did not go to war in 2003 and two years later Saddam decided to gas 10,000 people somewhere in Kurdistan in 2006? What if we had known he was going to do it in 2005 and did nothing? Would that have been right?
At the end of the day Saddam Hussein was a nasty piece of work who wanted to develop weapons of mass distruction and would have tried to do some if we had left him alone.
No matter what the Chilcott inquiry finds people have already made there minds up with regards to the war with Iraq. Unfortunately I dont think that Iraw as an issue will settle down. Whats more important is to concentrate on the worsening situation in Afganistan
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Imagine if we did not go to war in 2003 and two years later Saddam decided to gas 10,000 people somewhere in Kurdistan in 2006? What if we had known he was going to do it in 2005 and did nothing?
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First, if we had known for sure that he was going to gas people we should not have done nothing but if we had done nothing there would now be perhaps around 100000 more people alive in Iraq now than there are. And we still do not know the long term consequences of our intervention. There is no guarantee that we have created a lasting democracy and that there is not another despot waiting in the wings. Like medicine these things are shades of grey. And, of course, Tony Blair is right in just one thing and that is that Iran is and always was much more of a threat to us.
The same arguments can be made with regards to Afghanistan, but no one questions that war.
ReplyDeleteI do. But then in the course of my work I have met the amputees and seen the carnage. And I hope not quite so many have been killed in Afghanistan. In any case why does not questioning one completely different war justify another?
ReplyDeleteOne thing that baffles me about both wars is the idea that both countries are fomenting terrorism. I can't see that there was terrorism in Iraq until we stirred it up and the Al-Qaeeda that once were in Afghanistan are now in Pakistan. That is the nature of terrorism.It moves about and pops up here and there. If that is what we are supposed to be fighting (and it is not clear to me that it is) we are going about it the wrong way. Shock and Awe is not the way to win an asymmetric war.
Perhaps anonymous has left a zero out of the number of deaths in Iraq. According to Andrew Marr on his show today, the internationally accepted UN figure is 600,000 to which Alistair Campbell retorted that he couldn't prove it. Which is not much of a defence really.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we can all agree that mistakes were made during the war and that planning for afterwards was poor to say the least.
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