With fighting surging in Basra and other parts of Iraq, the Government is, yet again, squirming out of holding an enquiry into how this whole mess got started. With 4,000 dead Americans and a current best estimate of 1,200,000 dead Iraqi’s, Tony Blair is taking a little time out from solving the Middle East conflict to to talk about ‘Faith and Globilisation’ at Westminster Abbey. Marvellous.

To keep track of some of the people who are actually responsible for starting our involvement, its worth a look at http://www.holdthemtoaccount.com/.

To get an update on how others in the inner circle of war initiators has prospered read Catherine Bennett here. However, even there one of the biggest beneficiaries of the WMD scam is not mentioned. John Scarlett, was promoted in May 2004 to be head of MI6. This followed his role in overseeing the ‘intelligence’ behind the dodgy dossier as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Transparent corruption at the highest level.

This is definetely a long term Project for the New “choose your own” Century. So, if you are still at school and thinking of joining up for this never ending jolly foreign colonial escapade, better check this out first: http://www.beforeyousignup.info

Update: A British soldier was killed in Iraq in the early hours of this morning.

Update 2: Sounding out Tony Blair is going to try and ensure his appearance at Westminster Abbey is not a quiet event…

Amnesty International describes the curent state of play:

Carnage and despair in Iraq

Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the country is still in disarray. The human rights situation is disastrous, a climate of impunity has prevailed, the economy is in tatters and the refugee crisis continues to escalate.

Seumas Milne sums it up brilliantly in The Guardian:

There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy

The problem in Iraq, we’re now told, was a lack of preparation, or the wrong kind of planning, or mistakes in implementation. If only, say the neocons, we had put our man Ahmad Chalabi in charge from the start, the Iraqis wouldn’t have felt so humiliated. If only we hadn’t dissolved the army, the pragmatists insist, the insurgency would never have taken off. If only the Brits had been running the show, mutter the old Whitehall hands, all would have been different. The problem, it turns out, was not the invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab oil state on a tide of official deceit, but the way it was carried out…

…For the future, so long as the disaster of Iraq is put down to mistakes or lack of planning, the real lessons will not be learned, but repeated – as appears to be happening now in Afghanistan. Gordon Brown has at last promised a full Iraq inquiry when British troops are no longer in the firing line. But any more delay to a proper accounting of what has taken place – including, as the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said at the weekend, the nature of the US-British relationship – will only further corrode the political system. The disaster of Iraq has at least had the effect of demonstrating the limits of imperial power and restraining further US attacks. The danger is, however, that next time they’ll just try and do it differently – without the mistakes.

From Stop the War

Next Saturday 15 March, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, will see a day of global

protests. The London demonstration will assemble at 12 noon in Trafalgar Square and march down Whitehall on a route which will surround Parliament. The rally in Trafalgar Square will

highlight the disasters of five years and more of war.

Speakers will include Tony Benn, ex-SAS trooper Ben Griffin, representatives from Palestine, Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas, Lindsey German from Stop the War Coalition and film director Nick Broomfield. Joining us on the stage will be Omar Deghayes, recently released from the Guantanamo torture centre, where he was held for five years.