With newspaper reports today suggesting that a pullout [or even a phased one] from Iraq is on the cards in the very near future one has to wonder where that leaves the people and country of Iraq. Abandoned it would seem - and confronting a civil war. That the war is said to have cost the US some US$191 billion [yes! - you read correctly] is one thing. The death and carnage is another. It is almost now beyond doubt that the US - and therefore Australia and Great Britain as willing members of the coalition of the willing - had absolutely no plan, let alone an idea, what would happen once that dreadful war of "shock and awe" got underway and the military forces arrived at the gates of Baghdad. Time magazine has an interesting article on its investigation of how the US embarked on and undertook this entire Iraq debacle
Most commentary on the Chilcot Inquiry Report of and associated with the Iraq War, has been "lifted" from the Executive Summary. The Intercept has actually gone and dug into the Report, with these revelations : "THE CHILCOT REPORT, the U.K.’s official inquiry into its participation in the Iraq War, has finally been released after seven years of investigation. Its executive summary certainly makes former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the British push for war, look terrible. According to the report, Blair made statements about Iraq’s nonexistent chemical, biological, and nuclear programs based on “what Mr. Blair believed” rather than the intelligence he had been given. The U.K. went to war despite the fact that “diplomatic options had not been exhausted.” Blair was warned by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the
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