Iraq: the legacy

So Gordon Brown has finally announced the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq: and I'm sure he'll try to make the most of getting this electoral albatross from around Labour's neck. There's no doubt that widespread revulsion at Labour's decision to back up George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq played a major part in the government's loss of support at the last General Election, and rightly so: we were taken in to Iraq on a false prospectus, looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction which were never there, and the results of our invasion have been nothing short of disastrous for the Iraqi people.

In fact, of course, Brown has been trying for some time to distance himself from a policy he fully endorsed when the invasion took place: Private Eye's regular skit in which Comrade Brown denounces the actions of the "discredited imperialist warmonger Blair" may be exaggerated, but only just. The truth, of course, is that however much he may wish to obfuscate, the Prime Minister's fingerprints are all over the invasion of Iraq - and especially, as former Chancellor, all over the £8 billion cheque he signed to finance it. As recently as May last year, he defended the invasion in the clearest of terms, saying "I take my responsibility as a member of the Cabinet for the collective decisions that we made, and I believe they were the right decisions".

So now that the end of the British presence is near, what would we as Liberal Democrats - the only party consistently to have opposed the war in parliament - like to see? We still believe that the clear fact that the invasion was a disaster means that an apology - from the government and from every MP, Labour and Conservative, who voted for the war - would still be appropriate. But perhaps more importantly, a full and open public inquiry into how the decisions which led to war were taken, and into the conduct of the war, might begin to undo the damage this invasion has done to public trust in how politics is conducted in this country.

Because the sad truth is this: while the news of the decision to withdraw from Iraq made the headlines yesterday, this piece of news attracted rather less attention: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7787263.stm. The day the PM made his announcement, eighteen people were killed, and dozens wounded, by two bombs in Baghdad. The chaos the invasion has created in Iraq may have slipped from the headlines; but its effects, upon the Iraqi people and the Middle East more widely, will be felt for years.