For the fifth year running, anti-war campaigners will be meeting at Labour Party Conference. Last time I was in Bournemouth, it was 2003 and Labour Against The War was discussing the immediate aftermath of the conflict.
A year later, in Brighton, I was there when dozens of journalists from around the world joined delegates crammed into the Friends' Meeting House for a harrowing evening which included an unbearably poignant telephone interview with the brother of Ken Bigley, at that stage still alive and pleading with Tony Blair for his life. It's fair to say that few of us then would have thought three years on we would still be urging a Labour Government to take immediate steps to bring an end to this unholy alliance with the US which has led to so much death and suffering. Last year, at the Manchester conference (pictured) thousands of us marched in what we knew would be Blair's last conference. Despite the change in leadership which some erroneously thought would lead to a sea-change in our foreign policy, nothing has changed and meanwhile the recriminations continue.
The former head of the British Army has now attacked US postwar policy, calling it "intellectually bankrupt". General Sir Mike Jackson, who headed the army during the war in Iraq, describes as "nonsensical" the claim by the former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that US forces "don't do nation-building". He has also hit back at suggestions that British forces had failed in Basra. In his autobiography, he says tha Rumsfeld was "one of the most responsible" for the current situation in Iraq. Just what will it take for this Govt to change tack?
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