Gordon Brown with Tony Blair at a 2005 press conference Photo:
© GRAEME ROBERTSON/GETTY IMAGESGordon Brown with Tony Blair at a 2005 press conference
EVERYONE, bar former prime minister Tony Blair, now accepts that the Iraq war was a horren­dous mistake.

So for ex-prime minister Gordon Brown to say in his just-published memoirs, that he wished he had done more to stop Britain taking military action against Iraq's presi­dent Saddam Hussein by standing shoulder to shoulder with US presi­dent George W Bush in March 2003, is not entirely convincing.

In London, an estimated two mil­lion anti-war protesters were ignored by the Blair government which insisted Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) ready to be fired within 45 minutes.

Brown, a principled man, could have taken the Labour party with him had he chosen to oppose the war, but instead, he was quite aggressive in backing Blair. Now he claims the Americans had intelligence that threw doubt on whether Saddam possessed WMDs, but that this was not shared with Britain, which was "misled" by its closest ally.


Comment: The Lie of the 21st Century: How Mainstream Media 'Fake News' led to US Invasion of Iraq


Even without this intelligence, plenty of people realised back then that Saddam, though a brutal dicta­tor, did not present a strategic threat to Britain. The war killed thousands, further destabilised an already un­stable region, attracted Islamist militant groups into Iraq where there had been none, and gave some home-grown British Muslims an ex­cuse to take up terrorism and even carry out suicide bombings.


Comment: The illegal invasion of Iraq killed over a million people.


For Brown to now say his job as chancellor of the exchequer was merely to provide funds for the war is the equivalent of saying "I was only following orders".

No wonder he has a troubled conscience: "I ask myself over and over whether I could have made more of a difference before that fateful decision was taken."

Yes, Gordon, you could have.

For him to admit the Iraq war was illegal must count as crocodile tears.

"We now know from classified American documents, that in the first days of September 2002 a re­port prepared by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff's director for intelligence landed on the desk of the US de­fence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld," he writes in My Life, Our Times.

He goes on: "Commissioned by Rumsfeld... it is now clear how for­cibly this report challenged the of­ficial view. If I am right that some­where within the American system the truth about Iraq's lack of weap­ons was known, then we were not just misinformed but misled on the critical issue of WMDs.

"Given that Iraq had no usable chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that it could deploy and was not about to attack the coali­tion, then ... war could not be justi­fied as a last resort and invasion cannot now be seen as a propor­tionate response."

It's more than a personal tragedy that he did not say then what he is saying now - that the war was illegal.


Comment: Gordon Brown was complicit in the unrelenting chaos we see on the world stage today. The reverberations of the Iraq invasion continue as demented western elites use the same formula of lies and propaganda to invade any other country that refuses to be a stooge of the imperialist agenda: