Blair's War

The Iraq War began 18 years ago today. On a pack of lies, and opposed by 90 per cent of the British population but not by those who dared to draw salaries to provide an Official Opposition, that war killed more than a million people. That was in addition to the people who had already been killed by the sanctions regime, at least 575,000 of whom had been the children whose deaths Madeleine Albright has described as, "a price worth paying."

Vastly lower figures now circulate on the Internet. Recently, I have even seen 60,000 cited, a derisory number that would barely qualify as a war at all. Any figure lower than one million for the war itself, even before turning to the sanctions, is the stuff of David Irving: "Oh, there were hardly any deaths, really." Those who promote any such view have all the moral and intellectual seriousness of Irving, and it matters not one jot what grand titles or lavish sinecures they have managed to confer on each other.