Officials Stating the Bleeding Obvious Part 4

I like Michael Portillo. He speaks with a crude honesty that lets even the most simple person know exactly what he stands for. On the other hand he is like a snake you cannot tell from looking at him whether he is simply shiny or covered in slime (personally, I go for shiny).

Anyway, Portillo, is the latest of the British politicians to turn against the war. Apparently the whole enterprise was one big mistake:

The problem in this conflict is that we have doubts about the cause and our effectiveness. Blair does not bear responsibility alone for our being in Iraq. I was among that majority of MPs who voted to send the troops there. For those who made that judgment it is painful to own up that we were wrong. But it is becoming hard to avoid the admission.

Ands with this admission of guilt comes even more honesty. Did he support the war because he believed Blair's tale on WMD? to free the Iraqi people from tyranny? to keep the West safe from terrorism? or any number of other reasons that have been throw up by the apologists. No...

I backed the invasion because I thought the West needed to reassert its power after 10 years during which America had looked irresolute. It had made no effective response to a series of Al-Qaeda attacks that began with a truck bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993. After the decision by George Bush père not to march on Baghdad at the end of the Gulf war in 1991, Saddam provided another example of anti-American defiance that had gone dangerously unpunished.

And there you have the reason he, and probably the majority of politicians who gave Bush and Blair the freedom to do what they liked, supported such a disastrous war. The West (or specifically Britain and America) were looking a little weak and the best way that they could come up with to reassert their god-given right to global hegemony was to bomb a defenseless country into the stone-age.

You can make up your own conclusions on the crisis over Iran now.