Author Archives: Tony Dawson

Opinion: Iraq War, one year on

By Tony Dawson | Tue 19th February 2013 - 12:28 pm

Just over ten years ago, I was one dot in a crowd of one million people in London calling for the Labour government of Tony Blair to stop the Iraq war. We all knew that Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator who was much-hated in his own country but we knew equally well that the case for invasion of Iraq (it was never a ‘war’) was a gigantic deceit, cooked up by the Blair and Bush governments for their own purposes. We knew that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. We knew that far from being a friend of Al Qaeda and the Islamicists, Saddam was their sworn enemy and near the top of their death list. But these were ‘inconvenient truths’.

As I walked alongside Charles and Sarah Kennedy, Donnachadh McCarthy and Simon Hughes at the front of the Liberal Democrat contingent in the march, I thought to myself: “Wow! This is the biggest gathering of humanity in the UK since the Isle of Wight Pop Festival in 1969:and we haven’t even got Jimmy Hendrix or Joni Mitchell as a ‘draw’ . How can they ignore something as huge as THIS?”