Tuesday 11th July

There were celebrations yesterday (Sunday) in Iraq.  The city of Mosul has been liberated.  Three years ago ISIS took the city in almost no time as the Iraqi army practically ran away. The Caliphate was declared in that city, and the stranglehold of Daesh took hold, dragging the city and its unwilling citizens back into a barbaric interpretation of some form of radical Islam.  Now, after nine months of fighting and aerial bombardment (mostly by the Americans) the city is at last reclaimed.  But it is a city in ruins with who knows how many innocents killed.  ISIS fought house by house and used snipers and suicide bombers to devastating effect.  And there really was no alternative.  Helped by Kurdish fighters, the ‘reformed’ Iraqi army has re-taken the city.  ISIS fighters have fled into the surrounding desert and countryside, to re-emerge who knows where.

But although ISIS has been militarily defeated I doubt they will disappear.  And the city is almost completely flattened.  As of course is much else in Iraq – much of the devastation caused by the US and UK invasion in 2003 is still unrepaired.  And it is to that terrible war that we must look again, to see where we are now.  There is no definitive proof that our decision to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein (because Regime change was always the objective) led directly to the creation of ISIS.  But we interfered yet again in another countries’ Politics, largely for our own gain.  Saddam was certainly a tyrant, and totally undemocratic.  But he controlled the differing factions in Iraq, and by and large, the country prospered with good schools and hospitals and a large degree of religious freedom.  Since his terrible hanging there has been chaos and confusion and instability, and into that vacuum ISIS has emerged.  Aided by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and the CIA and no doubt our own security services they have spread into both Syria and Iraq.  And although they are being beaten back slowly in both countries – it has all been so unnecessary.

And, of course, I am glad that this terrible organization is losing power and ground, but we must ask ourselves what on earth we were thinking of fourteen years ago when we went to war for no good reason.