Avoiding peace

To say that the case for war in Iraq was built on lies is no longer controversial. Frankly, it shouldn't have been controversial prior to the war, but that's another issue altogether.

Nonetheless, George Monbiot writes that a whole new "set of lies is only now beginning to come to light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies and their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal and just, there may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we discovered last week, Saddam proposed to give Bush and Blair almost everything they wanted before a shot had been fired. Our governments appear both to have withheld this information from the public and to have lied to us about the possibilities for diplomacy."

And even worse, Monbiot reminds us, "The same thing happened before the war with Afghanistan."