Back to the Future for Iraq

Seumas Milne of the Guardian argues that, despite the efforts of Bush and Blair, the recolonisation of Iraq should not be be sold as an act liberation.

The danger of military interventions in the name of human rights is that they are inevitably selective and used to promote the interests of those intervening - just as when they were made in the name of "civilisation" and Christianity. If war goes ahead, the prospect for Iraq must be of a kind of return to the semi-colonial era before 1958, when the country was the pivot of western power in the region, Britain maintained military bases and an "adviser" in every ministry and landowning families like Ahmed Chalabi of the INC's were a law unto themselves. There were also 10,000 political prisoners, parties were banned, the press censored and torture commonplace. As President Bush would say, it looks like the re-run of a bad movie.