Today David Miliband will say in the course of his Indian trip that the so-called War on Terror was misconceived and may have caused “more harm than good”. Pity the Foreign Secretary didn’t have the courage to say this 7 years ago, pity it has been left till just 5 days before Bush disappears from office, but at least he has now officially laid bare the terrible canard which has lain at the heart of US geostrategic policy throughout the Bush Presidency. What a tragedy the Foreign Office didn’t have the guts, directly after 9/11, to condemn and reject this cloak for US domination which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The real lesson for the future is that this country should never again, as in the Blair era, kow-tow to every imperialistic demand of a US President. We should have our own foreign policy.

Some of us did say from the outset that the war on Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but was being cynically exploited to provide an excuse for extending American control across the world, as was clearly proposed in Bush’s 2000 campaign document ‘Project for the New American Century’. In an article in the Guardian on 6 September 2003 entitled “The War on Terror is bogus”, I set out the case for regarding this US expansionism as targeted at getting control of the major remaining repositories of oil across the world, especially in the Middle East and the Caspian, in the face of the rapid approach of ‘peak oil’ and the prospect of diminishing global oil supplies within the next 40 years. There are now US troops in 135 countries, no less than 70% of the total. I believe my claim made over 5 years ago has been fully validated by events, as is now at least partially acknowledged in David Miliband’s remarks.
What is so terrible, given the untold suffering of so many thousands of innocent civilians consequent on this policy, is that it is only now being admitted, what was obvious from the start, that manufacturing a war on terror for other covert purposes would actually generate the terrorism it was allegedly designed to eliminate. And by using the claim of a terrorist threat as a basis for pre-emptive aggressive military conquest, for long-term detention without trial (Guantanamo), and for interrogation methods now condemned as torture (water-boarding), the policy actually destroyed the US and Western contention that it was motivated by a belief in democracy and freedom

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