A belated enquiry has been started in Britain over Iraq War. It is meant to find an answer to the question whether the war was justified and was it necessary for Britain to join that war or not. The enquiry is being conducted by a committee headed by a highly reputable former civil servant Sir John Chilcot and has been gaining importance as it progresses. Most of the proceedings have centered round the oft-asked question about the authenticity of reports about Iraq's possessing of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) and it is becoming increasingly evident that the entire decision was based on highly doubtful intelligence reports about the presence of WMDs in Iraq.
There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator who was guilty of perpetrating a reign of terror in Iraq and executing a large number of his political opponents. There was also persecution and genocide of members of the unyielding minority groups like the Kurds. But did he pose a strong enough threat to Britain and other countries of the west to warrant an invasion on his country and a heavy loss of life, particularly of the hundreds of thousands of civilians that resulted from that invasion? And why was the report about the WMDs not confirmed by the government before launching such a destructive war? A person no less than the former foreign secretary Jack Straw in his evidence before the committee has admitted to the inaccuracy of the report that Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction that could be launched at a notice of 45 minutes. Straw also made a more surprising revelation that he had made a contingency plan under which Britain would have supported a US war against Iraq with logistics but would not have sent its troops into the war. But that plan was never discussed by the cabinet or even by a cabinet committee. Jack Straw's 8000 words memo submitted to the inquiry committee has all but admitted that the war was a mistake!
It has also come to light that the British prime minister Tony Blair in a letter to US president George W. Bush as early as July 2002, eight months before the war, had committed UK to the war.
These revelations through light upon the way the western governments were duped to join the war against Iraq and how the Bush administration played into the hands of the Zionist lobby to make their conspiracy of bringing about 'the clash of civilizations' a reality, and the reckless way they went about it all.
There now seems a growing realization in the US too about the follies committed by their past administrations of involving the US in active military conflicts in the region. In fact, it was involvement of the US in the first Gulf war and the stationing of the US troops in sensitive places in the region that gave rise to extremism among sections of the Muslim youth and brought into being terrorist outfits like al-Qaeda. The more the US and other western countries got involved in the region, the more terrorist outfits sprung up in the Middle East and in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The latest example is provided by the US drone attacks on Pakistan's tribal areas which are serving to feed the anti-US sentiment in the country.
The sooner the US leadership realizes this the better it would be for peace in the region and its relations with the peoples of Middle East and South Asia.
