ON the eve of the tenth anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq by British and US forces the BBC’s Panorama programme last night investigated the tissue of lies that was put out by Tony Blair about weapons of mass destruction that the Iraqi regime was on the verge of using against Britain.
What this programme has uncovered is exactly who were the sources of this intelligence, and in so doing it has helped expose the completely threadbare nature of the campaign of lies that provided the cover for a murderous war that cost hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives.
The entire war, it turns out, was justified on the word of two Iraqi defectors or asylum seekers.
One, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, was an asylum seeker in a German refugee camp in 1999 who suddenly announced to the German security forces that he was a chemical engineer who had been involved in a chemical weapons project in Iraq.
The other was a defector who claimed to have invented the non-existent mobile chemical weapons laboratories that figured so highly in the scare stories, lapped up by a credulous bourgeois media.
Neither of these two were believed by the relevant security services – the Germans passed the information on to their British counterparts with all manner of warnings about credibility that were completely ignored.
Equally ignored was more authoritative information that the Iraqi government had no WMDs.
Faced with the incontrovertible truth that there were no WMDs the latest lie being peddled in defence of Blair and Bush is that they ‘misled themselves’, that they genuinely believed this pack of lies.
This is nonsense. WMDs was merely a manufactured excuse by US and British imperialism to invade Iraq and grab its oil wealth.
This campaign of lies has not been restricted to Iraq.
In Afghanistan the invasion of that country was portrayed as a war against terror following the 9/11 attack, completely ignoring the fact that the attack was planned and executed by Saudi Arabians and had nothing to do with the Taleban or Afghanistan.
The same black propaganda was pumped out in order to justify the invasion of Libya where the rag-bag of jihadists and bandits were promoted by French and British imperialism into the role of ‘freedom fighters’ to be armed to the teeth and given all the military support necessary to overthrow the secular government of Colonel Gadaffi in order to grab the country’s oil wealth.
Now the same trick is being applied to Syria, where these same forces are portrayed as brave ‘rebels’ fighting the monster Assad, and the fact that they are terrorising the local population and introducing sectarian murder to the region – turning it into a no-go area for westerners along the way – is conveniently ignored as the British and French rush to provide them with arms.
Blair and Bush were not deluded, they knew full well what they were doing – going to war to try and re-conquer the world in the name of saving imperialism from its historic crisis.
The only delusion that the imperialists had was that they could bomb these countries into submission, invade and secure them for imperialist exploitation.
In reality, they have been driven out of Iraq and are being forced to run from Afghanistan, while in Syria their dreams of repeating Libya lie in tatters and they are now forced to openly invade on the side of their jihadist allies.
With imperialism facing huge defeats at the hands of the masses in these countries, and capitalism being forced to wage war against its own working class at home, the time is ripe for its final overthrow at the hands of the working class through the world socialist revolution.
Only then will the war criminals like Blair and Bush be made to answer for their crimes against humanity.
