spinoff

Jack Straw has been wheeled out to refute claims made by a top civil servant® that the UK’s involvement in Iraq has acted as a recruitment tool for terrorist fundamentalists.

 

A leak to a Sunday newspaper showed that as early as 2004, the government was warned by top Whitehall spoddos that our troops’ being in Iraq was a sop to terror recruiters. The result – an increased risk of domestic terrorist attacks. Oh dear.

 

The UK went to war in order to make itself safer. The free world needed to fight terror head on – it had to get in there and start hammering the people who threatened the basis of western civilisation. Hammer the right people, and civilisation would be protected, free from worry. Safer, even.

 

This leaked memo rubbishes that whole picture. Rather than making the country safer, the implication is that the war has made the country more at risk than before.

 

The government of course, denies this. The war is right. It must be right. Until now, the excuse quietly bandied about by Labour apologists has fixed on US isolation. The argument runs that someone had to stick to the US through the war, or else we’d end up with the single, global-hyper power out there on its own, isolated, with no friends left in Europe, acting unilaterally.

 

Someone’s got to stick with them; and if it’s us, then we might even be able to boss a few situations.

 

But apart from the second UN resolution, the UK has got nothing in return for sticking with the US; neither influence nor security.

 

And so the question now has to be asked; is the UK's blind faith in the US’s Middle East charade worthwhile? Have we had any return from this project aside from a large pile of British bodies? And a more dangerous country in which to live? And heightened paranoia in the capital?

 

The war has made us less safe. Spinoff massages its temples, furrows its brow, and thinks furiously to itself – has there been any thought given to planning this war at all? And if so, who on earth could have possibly expected to benefit from it?

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.