Appalling for Iraq and Britian

Last updated at 08:39 30 July 2004

It is a devastating indictment of a Prime Minister who dragged Britain to war on a false prospectus. Iraq, which was bitterly opposed to Osama Bin Laden is now "a battle ground for Al Qaeda, with appalling consequences for the Iraqi people."

The verdict of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee is coruscating.

Unlike the Hutton whitewash and Lord Butler's "nobody guilty" findings, there are no escape clauses for Mr Blair this time. Just a day after 68 people were killed by a suicide bomb near Baghdad, this report makes it clear there may be worse to come.

Despite official claims that the fall of Saddam has made a safer world, the Committee's Labour chairman, Donald Anderson, warns we are in greater danger from Al Qaeda than ever.

But the Committee's bleak analysis of conditions in Iraq is just as worrying. With too few troops on the ground, terrorists, militias and criminals are pouring in to fill the "vacuum".

The fledgling Iraqi army is incapable of maintaining security, which suggests our Forces will be stuck in the desert for years. Persistent violence threatens next year's elections. The failure to restore basic services "risks damaging the credibility of the UK".

Most chilling of all, Iraq teeters on the brink of becoming a "failed state", plunging the Middle East into utter chaos.

As if all this were not disturbing enough, Afghanistan - the other centre of the war on terror - could "implode" unless more Western support is forthcoming.

This is an abject litany of failure. Yet wasn't it only too predictable - and indeed predicted by this paper and other critics of Blair's war?

The tragedy is that a Prime Minister who rules by cronyism and cabal brushed aside every doubt and intelligence caveat. Indeed, he was so hell-bent on an invasion that he even reduced MI6 to an instrument of Government propaganda.

To quote former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, this "charlatan" has inflicted more damage on British intelligence than anyone since the cold war traitors, Burgess, Maclean and Philby.

As he relaxes in his freebie Barbados holiday home, Mr Blair might care to consider that the shameful, shaming mess he has precipitated is not only 'appalling' for Iraq, but for Britain too.

The killing game

KILL, kill, kill. "Cut him up. Liquidate him. That's my boy". The pornographers of violence didn't give a damn for the consequences when they devised the sick Playstation game which gives players extra points for the viciousness of the 'murders' they commit.

Manhunt is described "entirely unapologetically" as the most violent and amoral game ever, with players using everything from meat cleavers to a chainsaw in acts of electronic slaughter.

And now an innocent teenager - a flesh and blood human being, not a computer image - lies dead, battered and stabbed by a "friend" said to have been obsessed by this squalid game.

Of course there is no proof that Manhunt was directly responsible for Warren LeBlanc's appalling crime. But doesn't common sense suggest that such desensitising material can drive impressionable minds over the edge?

Regulation? Forget it. Even after the publicity of LeBlanc's trial, shops are still selling this vile material to under 18s. "Restrictions" by the Board of Film Classification are meaningless.

Meanwhile, several retailers have had the decency to remove Manhunt from their shelves, but others are still cashing in. Clearly, it will take official action to end this poisoning of young minds. But will we get it? Don't hold your breath.

In our anything goes, value free, non-judgmental society, doesn't money usually talk louder than morality?