Iraq...Ten Years After.

   February 15th 2003 was a coordinated day of protests across the world, with millions of people expressing opposition to the then-imminent Iraq War. It was part of a series of protests and political events that had begun in 2002 and continued as the war took place. The British Stop the War Coalition (StWC) held a protest in London which it claimed was the largest political demonstration in the city's history. Police estimated attendance as well in excess of 750,000 people and the BBC estimated that around a million attended. The protest was organised under the slogan "No war on Iraq - freedom for Palestine".
    It is perhaps disheartening to think that ten years on Iraq is still blighted by suicide bombings. So typically English that day in 2003. The largest anti-war protest since Vietnam, yet it was so peaceful. "Make Tea Not War" remains my favourite refrain from that day. Families picnicking in hyde Park pouring peaceful cups of tea from thermoses sat on folding garden furniture as George Galloway vented forth on the stage booming aroung the park on the PA his face ten foot hgh on the installed video walls dotted around Hyde Park.
   And now ten years on and with Saddam Hussein long dead where is Iraq? Still struggling, still suffering under terror.
   Human Rights Watch warns that “the Iraq people today have a government that is slipping further into authoritarianism”, listing “draconian measures against opposition politicians, detainees, demonstrators, and journalists, effectively squeezing the space for independent civil society and political freedoms in Iraq”.
   Iraq is now 150th out of 179 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, worse than Russia or Zimbabwe; and the US government-funded Freedom House rates Iraq 6 for civil liberties and 6 for political rights, with 7 being the worst. No wonder Tony Dodge, an Iraq expert at the LSE, warns that “Maliki is heading towards an incredibly destructive dictatorship”.
   We did not stop an inferno which began a month later, consuming the lives of hundreds of thousands, including 179 British soldiers.
   An analysis by Iraq Body Count and co-authors published in 2011 concluded that at least 12,284 civilians were killed in at least 1,003 suicide bombings in Iraq between 2003 and 2010 killed. The study reveals that suicide bombings kill 60 times as many civilians as soldiers