The news from Iraq doesn't make comfortable reading given the lives lost and the £Billions spent on bringing 'democracy' to that country. Back in 2004, I read a short book, written by a weapons inspector, about the fruitless search for 'weapons of mass destruction' and I gained the impression that the invasion of Iraq was based upon a lie. Nothing that has happened since then has done much to change that perception and the continued delay in publication of the Chilcott Report strengthens that view.
Quite recently I watched a movie called 'Green Zone' which is a fictionalisation of the same fruitless search for WMDs in Iraq and it refers to the part that the Iraqi army could have played in stabilising the situation immediately after the invasion. This version suggests that the Americans couldn't countenance having any post-invasion connection with the Baathists who ran the army so it was disbanded and, as a result, the country descended into faction-fighting, which continues to this day.
And now we have a different version of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, bull-dozing their way towards Baghdad and, if current reports are to be believed, doing it very successfully. At the same time it would seem that the Kurds are seizing the opportunity to establish their own state so we are now watching the fragmentation of Iraq and a descent into extremist sectarianism, the things that the invasion and post-invasion Billions were meant to avoid.
Rather than bringing democracy, it would seem that the west has brought more death and destruction and, most probably, an even greater threat to the west's supply of oil than existed before.
And Tony Blair might have been able to stop it at the beginning. But he didn't.