I've been meaning to rant about this all week...and apparently, my rants have at least one fan!
But Gordon Brown did annoy me with this standard line about: Saddam Hussein was bad and therefore the Iraq War was good. Absolute rot!
Blair rolled out the same line when he hit the Chilcot Inquiry too, and Bush has used it many times, as has Cheney and the rest of the Neo-con arses.
I think trying to claim success for the Iraq war by pointing to the benefits of removing Saddam Hussein is a bit like the Police raiding and trashing a student flat with about 50 violent officers, failing to find any drugs whatsoever but claiming success by cleaning up the kitchen a bit and saying that it was a haven for germs!
They invaded Iraq because they wanted the oil; because there weren't enough buildings to bomb in Afghanistan after 911 ; because George Bush wanted to avenge his Dad and because - officially - Hussein was this hideously dangerous nuclear threat.
Hundreds of thousands of dead innocent people later and they say that removing the terrible tyrant Saddam Hussein proves it was worth doing.
Well in that case why hasn't the West invaded Zimbabwe? Why hasn't the West liberated Tibet? Why was nothing done about Dafur? Why was something not done about Burma? The list goes on...
The answer of course - we know why. Nothing in it for us. If there was no oil in Iraq and no Bush history, no secret Saudi agenda, is it likely that Britain and the US would have spent umpteen trillion supposedly "liberating" the Iraqi people from their oppressive ruler? The same oppressive ruler they armed and supported at some cost throughout the 80s I hasten to add.
...errrrr no.
Anyway, I appreciate this is a big dose of the "bleedin' obvious", but I felt it needed to be said again.