The Guardian needs to remember its own role in the Iraq war and its 1 million excess deaths

NBC

More than 1 million Iraqis died as a consequence of the combined US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Guardian fully supported the invasion in March of that year.

Today the Guardian’s Editor and the writer Jonathan Freedland write self-importantly of the lessons that can be learned. Freedland claims to have argued against it ‘on these pages’ and the Editorial forgets that in 2003, it argued for the attack.

In January 2003, the Guardian editorial explicitly made the case for what it called ‘decisive action.’

Friedland is referring to a piece in March 2002, a full year earlier. He wasn’t arguing against the invasion in the days and weeks before the assault as many of us took to the streets in protest.

His Guardian colleagues David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen, parroting Israeli propaganda, were all for the attack and, years later, were still desperately trying to deny their complicity.

In those days, my employer, the University of the West of Scotland, reprimanded me for advertising anti-war events on the email system and for upsetting colleagues who had a perfect right to be blood-thirsty.

The New York Times apologised in May 2004 for misleading its readers.

The Guardian reported the NY Times apology without mentioning that they had not yet done so.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/jan/19/leaders.politics

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/17/the-guardian-view-on-iraq-20-years-on-the-costs-of-war

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/17/iraq-war-spies-labour-invasion-conflict

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/mar/13/labour.iraq

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/feb/17/iraq.iraq

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/03/10-years-right-invaded-iraq

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublishing.usnews

13 thoughts on “The Guardian needs to remember its own role in the Iraq war and its 1 million excess deaths

      1. The invasion of Iraq was the work of George W Bush backed up by Tony Blair. Blaming Israel for all the world’s problems is anti – Semitic. I’ve enjoyed your blog but I’m unfollowing you now.

        Like

        1. Hey..anonymous , you are unfollowing , I’m pleased.Israel is an abomination , as for “anti semitic” we are all tired of hearing that nonsense get a life sort out your own atrocities against the Arabs then we might listen to your crowing about your feelings being hurt by so called anti semitism .

          Like

        2. Dear ‘Anonymous’ It is not being anti semitic to accuse a country of crimes against humanity which undoubtedtly Israel (along with many others) is guilty of and I don’t blame you for having very simplistc views after all you have been fed this tripe by Governments and the media for generations now. It shames me that the British Government is the lap dog of the Americans on this issue simply because of very powerful lobbying in their country that Politicians are afraid to speak out for fear of losing electoral and financial support.

          Liked by 1 person

  1. Now they are promoting war in Europe. Causing trouble with China. The £5Billion spent on more nuclear subs would g3 better spent rebuilding Iraq etc. Cutting migration. Negotiating peace in Europe. Some people never learn making monies from munitions and war.

    Liked by 2 people

  2. The Iraq war opitomises the very essence of sleasy British scubaggery, murder and exploitation. And more than anything their dishonesty. If it ain’t dishonest it ain’t British. Anyone remember Katharine Gunn? She leaked the british scumbaggery and was charged. The case collapsed because the British couldn’t allow their filthy dishonesty to be exposed in court.

    Liked by 2 people

  3. And, don’t forget that it was Britain that effectively overthrew the democratically elected Iraqi government in 1953 in order to install their puppet the Shah. How different (and peaceful) might the middle east be had the British, French and the USA supported democracies rather than the band of thuggish dictatorships they instead chose.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. My one abiding memory of Iraq Pt2 was being in the same room as the Engineer monitoring oil flows – In conversations I discovered aside an early glitch, not a barrel of difference in production was recorded from “pre-war”.
    Nightly on the news on our makeshift mess appeared pictures of oil fields alight and the world going mad over oil and fuel prices because of a shortage arising from the Iraq “war”. Nobody batted an eyelid.

    I’ve never ever been so stunned at a scam being perpetrated on the public at governmental scale in my life, but that has coloured my opinion of UK Ministers ever since.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.