MANY people in Britain want Tony Blair tried as a war criminal, and there were shouts of 'too late' when he repeated on Friday before the Iraq enquiry commission that he didn't have the war dead in mind when he said he had no regrets about the Iraq war. All wars are cruel, and all governments make a case for them one way or the other. What was unusual about the Iraq war was the spate of lies the governments in London and Washington resorted to for justifying the 2003 invasion. The panoply of untruths ranged from the 'sexed up' intelligence dossier that spoke of a '45-minute warning time' of an Iraqi attack to the fake uranium trail that led to Niger. At least for one man in Britain this was too much: British scientist David Kelly committed suicide. This is just one part of what the Bush-Blair duo did to fool their voters and prepare them for a war that toppled the Baathist regime but also ended up destroying Iraq itself.

The Security Council had authorised the Hans Blix commission to verify and locate the weapons of mass destruction which Saddam Hussein was supposed to possess. Baghdad surprised the US and Britain when it offered to cooperate with the commission and throw open Saddam's palaces to the probe team. As Blix later reported to the UN, he found no 'smoking gun'. But still, without waiting for a UN resolution authorising war America and Britain decided to have a go at the oil-rich country.

As subsequent accounts of some White House deliberations reveal, the neocons in the Bush administration had decided even before 9/11 that Iraq had to be destroyed. Besides military casualties on all sides, the Iraq invasion led to a staggering number of civilian dead — estimated between 200,000 and half a million — destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and ignited sectarian and ethnic strife. The blasts on Thursday killing over 50 people, most of them in Karbala, remind us of the continuing consequences of the Bush decision to which Mr Blair was party.