Take back control

I am a lifelong member of CND and a joint initiator of the cross Party North Tyneside Anti-War Coast Group, which set up to oppose the Government’s Iraq War invasion in 2003. At last the Chilcott Report has justified all we campaigned for on behalf of the 179 British families who lost their loved ones and the 200,000 Iraqis killed.

It is a continuing calamity, having opened a Pandora’s box in the Middle East, which has had frightening repercussions with hate crime increasing, terrorism and thousands of refugees fleeing war zones to survive in the very countries who started these war crimes.

One and half million of us British citizens flocked to London to try to prevent the Iraq war – but to no avail.

Chilcott ratifies the army did not equip its soldiers adequately, that the 45-minute so-called intelligence dossier was a fabrication. There was lack of planning for how civil life would be organised after the Iraq invasion. Mr Blair and his advisers did not listen to the advice that sectarian violence would be unleashed, once Saddam Hussein was removed from dictatorship. But who maintained Saddam and armed him prior to the regime change policy by the USA?

We live in a world whose most successful product is killing humans. Too many of our citizens and policies are quietly, even secretly, given employment to maintain the permanent war economy. We have now gained the ability to kill like computer war games with pilotless drones, from thousands of miles away.

I also notice in all the media there is no mention of the avarice to steal and asset strip the oil that has made these countries so significant, or even suggest in all the publicity surrounding the seven-year wait that the need for oil was another important reason for starting the war.

In my view the whole project of Iraq Invasion was USA plans to destabilise all the aforementioned countries, in order to maintain control and influence, with the tragic consequences for the world, in order to maintain the power of the globalised corporations, whatever the results for the masses of ordinary people like us.

Have they no shame?

Vicki Gilbert,

member of Labour Party for 60 years