The massive 2003 public campaign against Blair’s attempt to take the UK into war against Iraq demanded a war powers rule in Parliament to ensure that no government could ever again commit the country to war without Parliament’s approval. A decade later, the fight goes on for the ruling.
The Syrian social movement has to be conscious of the necessity of establishing a just economy. Strong checks need to be built against the post-war government so that all Syrians understand the conditions of aid and consequences of reconstruction plans on their lives and the lives of their childre
The gap between the invaders' expectations and the reality that emerged in Iraq was immense. But even as the ground war opened on 20 March 2003, there were clear indications of the carnage to come.
Many of the problems that afflict Iraqis today are rooted in the rushed and undemocratic constitution of 2005, says Zaid Al-Ali.
Still they continue to caricature and minimise the opposition at the time as they sense the threat to the balance of power. But the fact is this. Without the battering ram of the Murdoch press especially, and media generally, the UK Parliament could not have voted for the Iraq invasion.
It is an odd coincidence, the sudden bright spotlight on drones at the same time as the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war, but it raises at least one common question: what is our attitude toward the innocent victims of war? The answer trends toward utter indifference.
From a potentially subjective point of view, a Kurd could argue that the long hardship and series of disasters inflicted upon the people of Iraq are direct consequences of the complacency and indifference embedded in the foreign policy of the superpowers.
It is worth asking whether the last ten years would have been such a disaster under the consensual, independent, and Iraqi-led transition that the British and Americans were so keen to avoid.
British recognition of the genocide against Iraqi Kurds reinforces their significant political and economic successes of the past ten years since the 'liberation' of the Iraq war. What future lies ahead for those in neighbouring Kurdistans?
It is the marriage of the intimate knowledge of the particular - the only knowledge the particular is susceptible to, by definition - with a moral compass, that should have guided policy towards Iraq. openDemocracy's debates were my re-schooling.
Tony Blair's continued insistence of the war in Iraq as the 'right choice' displays a crucial incomprehension of the disastrous legacy of the invasion and occupation, as well as the falsified narrative of British history that supported it. Now, the architect of Britain's most disastrous interventi
The British Parliament is set to debate the political recognition of Saddam Hussein's campaign against the Kurds as genocide. With the threat of chemical weapons in Syria a declared 'red line', the need to properly understand and account for the legacy of the largest chemical attack against a civi