Iraq: Ignoring the Responsibility For

The World Still Waits, but Especially Iraq
Commentary: Ignoring the past doesn't erase our responsibility for it

Aug. 11, 2011 - It has been observed for at least a century that England and America are two nations separated by a common language. Today there is another difference. England is interested in finding out how it came to participate in an unnecessary, illegal and immoral war. America is not.

Two years ago the British government set up the Chilcot Inquiry, a commission charged with investigating how that country became involved in the invasion of Iraq, what went wrong and how the response to a similar situation in the future could be more effective. After numerous public hearings, the Inquiry’s final report is being written and will be published in the next few months.

The conclusions of the draft report have already started to leak out and were covered extensively in British media last week. The story was not considered worth mentioning by American newspapers however.

According to the British press, the report concludes former Prime Minister Tony Blair is responsible for four main failings. He asserted it was beyond doubt that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when the intelligence supported no such conclusion. He claimed to have not made up his mind about the war when he had already secretly pledged to President Bush in the summer of 2002 that Britain would participate. He kept his cabinet ministers in the dark about his war plans. And he had no plans made to deal with the chaos that ensued after the fighting stopped.

Unlike Britain, in the United States there has been no serious effort to examine the war in depth. read more>>>