Those of us who have been solidly against the war from the beginning, with our slogans of ‘Bring The Troops Home Now’, Not In My Name’ and ‘No Blood For Oil’ should be ecstatic -shouldn’t we?
Shouldn’t we be cheering, shouldn’t we be happy, that it’s been anounced that British troops will be completely withdrawn from Iraq between now and the end of 2008? Haven’t we finally got what we wanted?
Hardly.
There’s the thousands upon thousands who’ve been jailed, murdered, maimed, tortured, bombed or otherwise destroyed, there’re millions of refugees on the move, a nuclear standoff with Iran and the Middle East on the verge of total regional conflagration. That’s just for a start – then there’s the broken British Army, politicised, demoralised and damaged – oh yes and then there’s the fact that our country will be forever associated with the extralegal atrocities of Bush and his corporate military goons. There’s those things.
And then there’s the fact that we sent naive, ill-equipped teenagers, who thought they’d joined up to defend their country, to almost certain death in the full knowledge that this illegal, war of aggression was being pursued simply to secure US corporate dominance over world oil markets. We turned those young people into de facto mercenaries, killers for Halliburton, Exxon and the American way.
I say ‘we’ particularly because it
Happy? Don’t make me laugh..
