Chilcot’s Anatomy of a War

Western democracies pining for new Wars to sustain their industry nullifies the very essence of their being.
Peace has become a threat for Western democracies. At least this is broadly evident from the Chilcot Report which presented its findings leading to involvement of Britain in the Iraq War launched in league with big brother the United States on March 20, 2003. The War caused 1.3 million deaths and completely devastated Iraq, pushing it to the verge of balkanization and unleashing the satanic ISIS upon the region.
The 2.6 million-word report stops just short of branding the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair ‘a liar’. It makes no bones about Blair government’s complete absence of judgment in rushing to war without exhausting peaceful alternative options. The British Government depended upon flawed intelligence report, mainly from the CIA, which were neither challenged nor tested for sound legal justification. Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s advice was not adequately scrutinized.
The Report points out that the justification for war was built upon fabricated evidence of Saddam Hussein’s Government manufacturing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and Saddam being a threat to peace and security to the region (read oil supplies to the Western Industrial powers). There was no need to rush into the war as UN Inspectors were engaged in inspection of stockpile of Iraqi arms. The British Government could not fulfill the objectives it had fixed prior to the war. It mourns the loss of 200 Britons in the War and death of nearly 150,000 Iraqis till July 2009.
The committee was appointed by former British Prime Minister Mr. Gordon Brown in July 2009 and was assigned a year for the submission of the Report. But the Committee took nearly seven years to probe the circumstances that led to the War and Britain’s involvement.
The Report is mysteriously silent on the role of the media whose hysterical campaign had considerably influenced the public opinion, but not to the extent desired by the then dispensation. Home Secretary Jack Straw is on record to have stressed the need for aggressive campaign to rope in the media and ease the task of building the case for the British Government.
What is fairly evident now is that the Western democracies””in this case one being the oldest and the other being the strongest””could employ lies, half truths, untruths and outright falsehoods to mislead the public opinion with the so-called free press just being another cog in the wheel of the propaganda machine.
If indeed these democracies feel threatened with the continued reign of peace and absence of war and opportunities for new contracts for their MNCs, why blame dictators and despots for violation of human rights, bloodletting, suppression of civil liberties and mayhem. It is now clear that capitalism-linked democracies are new threats to peace. Their high consumption societies, the energy-guzzling industries and transport, their huge standing armies, the weapon manufacturers, and finally their lobbies build constant pressure to promote war and more wars. The peace-loving nations can ignore these factors only at their own peril. If indeed the Western democracies have come to depend on wars to satiate the bellicosity of their manufacturers, why flaunt the fig leaf of peace, prosperity and progress. It is time the world realized the dangerous trajectory the West has come to pursue and see through their designs that come wrapped up in elegant slogans.