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What's the war story after twelve months?

From the archive, first published Thursday 5th Feb 2004.

TWELVE months ago as we were being persuaded war was necessary to save us from the clear and present threat of Saddam Hussein and his ever increasing weapons of mass destruction, I began to loose what little trust I have in our political leaders.

12 months on and not one of those weapons has been found, and on the very day that David Kay, the man President Bush sent to find Saddam's WMD, announced that he thinks the weapons never existed and that the intelligence that lead us to war was "almost all wrong", it is the BBC that is the villain for telling us what has turned out to be true, though in a shoddy manner.

Our prime-minister stands in the house of commons smug with the conclusions of a whitewash he commissioned, while all around the world sees that the impassioned pleas he made to send us to war are at worst lies and at very best completely misinformed.

In these last 12 months I have lost faith in the very concept that we live in a democracy. We have been treated like children, expected to back the murder of thousands because our leader says it is right. Then when it is plainly proved wrong, we are expected to divert our gaze and run like eager dogs after a new stick thrown in the hope we forget the lies.

What ever Lord Hutton's whitewash may say the truth is simple, either the government lied to us about its reasons for going to war, or its intelligence was so poor it shouldn't have been used as a guide to pickup a takeaway meal let alone go to war. Either way the government is lying or incompetent and something must change and it is we the public that must insist on it.

Andrew Martyr-Icke, Montfort Street, Evesham.

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