One of the Most Disastrous Wars Ever Fought
By PATRICK COCKBURN - Counterpunch (Original in Independent HERE) - March 18, 2008
Baghdad. The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain. It has been small but we achieved nothing. It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish.It's a "humiliating defeat" for the UK, and just about everyone there sees it as such. While Prime Minister Brown "insists it is not the right time for an immediate investigation", he promises there WILL be an inquiry. "There is a need to learn all possible lessons from the military action in Iraq and its aftermath," he said.
The British failure in the Iraq war has been even more gross because it has not ended with a costly military victory but a humiliating scuttle. The victors in Basra and southern Iraq have been the local Shia militias masquerading as government security forces.
Tony Blair's former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, "warned it could take 'decades' to bring calm to Iraq. He also admitted the British and US governments had seriously underestimated the scale of the task before them in 2003."
That article concludes with a list of the four UK inquiries into the war and its run-up, saying that "few answers" have resulted.
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