John McDonnell spits on the graves of the Iraq War dead

Iraq was the most formative issue of my political life. It awakened and brought home to me with shuddering clarity the savage brutality of US imperialism and the base subordination of the British state to Washington, shamelessly using the umbrella of US hegemony to pose on the world stage as a major power.

The decimation of Iraq was a crime of the ages for which not one of those responsible has ever faced so much as a day of justice. Up to a million Iraqi men, women and children were killed, while millions more were injured, traumatised and/or displaced as the country slid into the abyss of sectarian carnage out of which the monster of ISIS and Salafi-jihadism emerged. The chaos, dislocation and unremitting carnage that continues to engulf the region today can be traced back to the 20th of March 2003, the day that American and British bombs and missiles first started raining down on Baghdad.

Imagine then how Iraqis who lost sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, who saw their lives literally ripped apart as a consequence of the war that was unleashed against their country on the basis of lies, imagine how they must feel when they see the likes of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell being treated today as respectable public figures in Britain, enjoying lucrative careers and feted as elder statesmen by the country’s political…