Today, saw the official ending of our six years of military presence in Iraq.
Only future generations will be able to provide a clear answer as to whether we should ever have been in the country in the first place; many of the official documents recording the decision to take military action are still classified as secret.
Countless lives have been needlessly lost, both of our troops and the Iraqi people. The benefits achieved from the ‘liberation’ are still not completely obvious.
The reasons given to the UK population for such a drastic show of force, have been proven to be false. Our leaders betrayed our trust and that of the military personnel who were sent into battle on their orders. No-one has been charged with misleading us all.
It seems ironic, that the man who made the ultimate decision to go to war in Iraq, is now prancing around, with his usual air of self-importance, as an envoy for peace in the Middle East.
His successor, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has said:
“Today Iraq is a success story. We owe much of that to the efforts of British Troops”
Opposition Leader, David Cameron disagrees and has called for an official enquiry into the war. He said:
“There are vital lessons to learn and we need to learn them rapidly and the only justification for delay can, I’m afraid, be a political one.”
Whoever is ultimately judged to be right, it will be too late to be of much comfort to the families of those troops and Iraqis, whose lives were sacrificed for what appears to have been nothing more than a war of vanity.
