From Iraq to Afghanistan: repeating the same mistakes

Cartoon: Steve Bell

Stop the War President Tony Benn says: “The campaign against the Iraq war has been proved correct. The withdrawal of the British troops leaves Iraq in no better state than when they arrived.”

The failure to develop any kind of civil society or even to train up Iraqi forces is underlined by the fact the British are handing over to the US not to Iraqis. Every death of a British service man or woman in this war has been a tragedy, made more acute by the pointlessness of the operation.

No other parent should suffer what we went through

Peter Brierley, whose son Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley was killed in Iraq, says: “It was an illegal war. We were told we were going to find weapons of mass destruction but there were none so the government then decided the war was about overthrowing Saddam Hussein instead. In this way they have dragged the war out for 6 years. I have prayed every single night for the soldiers to come home so that no other parent has to go through what we went though.”

Stop the War believes there should be a public inquiry without delay into how Britain was taken into an illegal and unjustified war. Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes and the Government should apologise for the catastrophe it has iinflicted on Iraq, with the deaths of more than one million Iraqis and 179 British service men and women killed.

The British public no more wants our troops in Afghanistan than it did in Iraq. As Stop the War President Tony Benn, says, ”The decision to move the troops to Afghanistan is a repetition of the same mistakes for which we will pay dearly.”

Campaign for troops out now

The withdrawal from Iraq is a response to British public opinion, but it is also a product of the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Stop the War will be intensifying its campaign to bring the troops out of Afghanistan, an occupation which is fast becoming another British foreign policy disaster.

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