The US  retreat from Iraq silently under cover of night says it all.   But there are painful lessons, wholly contrary to the spin, which Western opinion (and particularly US opinion) needs to learn but will find hard to swallow.  For almost everything about this catastrophe was wrong from start to finish – from its cause to its management to its consequences.

George Bush declared war on Iraq because Saddam Hussein had taken part in 9/11.   He had nothing to do with it whatever.   Bush’s real motive for the invasion was to build a lasting military platform in the Middle East (since the continued presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia had become untenable) to secure permanent control over the oil.

Blair made out he dragged Britain into the invasion to rid the world of Saddam’s WMD.   There weren’t any, and the intelligence services (David Kelly and others) had made clear to him they had already guessed as much.   But he went ahead, 10 months before the invasion without any prior consultation, because his overriding motive was to make Britain (and himself) close partner with the US as the world’s leading power.

The invasion was illegal since it could not be legally justified by UN Resolution 1441 alone without a second resolution.   Lord Goldsmith, the Government’s Chief Law Officer, made this clear until he was railroaded by Blair’s minions into saying the opposite in ordder to give Blair the legitimacy he needed.

The evidence to justify the invasion was cooked up in two dodgy dossiers and several soundbites carefully crafted to pretend that Saddam was a far greater threat than he was.

The Americans, whose overriding interest was the oil of which they immediately took sole control, had little or no concern about reviving either the Iraqi economy or administration apart from trying to turn it into a subject capitalist colony (through Paul Bremer’s notorious 100 edicts).   The subsequent insurgency was grossly mishandled by huge levels of retaliatory killings (at least 100,000) of which innocent civilians were the main victims.

None of the objectives of the invasion has been achieved, apart from the removal of Saddam.   No WMD were found, US control over Middle East oil has had to be abandoned, Iraqi democracy scarcely exists (several months after the election there is still no Iraqi government), the Iraqi economy and society are still largely in ruins, and the insurgency is now set to redouble (the 535 civilians reportedly killed last month made it the bloodiest for more than two years).

All told, this is a saga of epic failure from which Iran emerges as the main beneficiary.

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