Lies, Damned Lies and Iraq

Peter Kilfoyle has been a vocal and persistent critic of Britain’s involvement in the war in Iraq. As a member of the British Parliament – and a Labour one, too – he has spoken out frequently on the subject, accusing the then Prime Minister, Anthony Blair, of ‘self-delusion’ in authorising the country’s military forces to march into Baghdad alongside their American counterparts.

In this book, he sets out the case at considerable length. The entire Iraqi adventure, he contends, was a huge ‘mistake’, and one which was fraught with dire consequences. He is particularly incensed over the disparity between the public case that was put out for the war and the ‘hidden agenda’ that he believed drove, in particular, the American administration at the time. ‘The United States was always about regime change – an illegal act’, he notes, but:

The question is how much of this agenda did Tony Blair share – what did he know, and when did he know it? The narrow historical perspective of this debate is that many people had profound doubts about American policy towards Iraq, and were alarmed by Tony Blair’s drive to co-ordinate British policy with that of the Americans in this area.

…It remains to be seen, of course, how many of the questions raised in this book will be answered by the official inquiry that has now been ordered into the Iraq war by the present British Government.