'From Wiltshire to Westminster'

                       as published in the Wiltshire Times

2 September 2010

Andrew Murrison MP  

What a marvellous piece of mid-term window dressing the official ending of Operation Iraqi Freedom is. But President Obama's insistence that his boys are coming home does invite us to take stock of what has been achieved in Iraq since 2003.

Tony Blair's memoirs out this week may help. Even if he'll not be touching the profits, I don't have £25 for a copy. However, I understand it lays bare his ‘anguish' over the part he played in Iraq . Perhaps he's looking for redemption. I hope he finds it.

I opposed Blair and my then party leader Iain Duncan-Smith in 2003. A colleague who entered the House with me in 2001 but who has been much more successful said at the time, without the slightest hint of embarrassment, that my stance would damage any chances of preferment. He was probably right but my only regret in opposing the Iraq war is that I did not do so more vociferously.

Obama can grandstand as much as he likes but seven years on Iraq remains a basket case, a brutal, murderous place that is incapable still of any truly independent existence. Nearly 5000 allied troops and 100,000 civilians have been killed and much treasure has been wasted. Al Qaeda, absent from Saddam's Iraq , has now colonised the country and the West is viewed with mistrust at best right across the Muslim world to our very great cost.

This summer the MOD is undertaking a strategic review of the men and material we need for the defence of the UK and its interests. If we concede that the Iraq war was misconceived we will have no cause to shape our Armed Forces around the possibility of a similar conflict in the future. Force design requires us to learn the lessons of history.