The Iraq war has now reached the stage where all the apologists in the media , in government and here on Mudcat are scrabbling to find any means to excuse their Neocon ideology. An ideology, which to our eternal shame has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents and the body count will continue to accelerate as the conflict descends into all out civil war.

As Matthew Parris writes in today's Times,

"They are building a lifeboat for their reputations. The task is urgent. It is no small thing to find oneself on the wrong side of an argument when the debate is about the biggest disaster in British foreign policy since Suez; no small thing to have handed Iran a final, undreamt-of victory in an Iran-Iraq war that we thought had ended in the 1980s; no small thing to have lost Britain her credit in half the world; no small thing — in the name of Atlanticism — to have shackled our own good name to a doomed US presidency and crazed foreign-policy adventure that the next political generation in America will remember only with an embarrassed shudder."

The current lifeboat is "The principle was good but we fucked up the execution".This is another lie in a long line of lies,the reason we have been defeated in Iraq is simply that the decision to illegally invade was a very bad decision...a criminal decision which, if you ignore more Neocon lies, has made the world and specifically UK/USA much more dangerous places to live.

It is also a decision which chains our young men inside a butchers shop where they will be slaughtered as they were in Vietnam, while our leaders saw, hammer and screw as they attempt to build the boat which will save their political careers......Ake