Neil Mackay - The War on Truth: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Invasion of Iraq but Your Government Wouldnt Tell You

To Susan Moody
who knew everything there was to know about truth.

Look, I know this appears to have nothing to do with Iraq, but can I ask if youve ever heard about a really strange ape called Koko the Gorilla?

Well, Koko is in her thirties and shes been raised by linguists at Stanford University in America who have taught her how to talk to humans using more than 1,000 expressions in sign language. Apparently, her keepers say, she knows many more words in spoken English.

One day, Koko got herself into a huge monkey tantrum as gorillas often do and managed to rip a stainless steel sink from a wall. When the nearest human to hand confronted her with her wanton act of gorilla violence and asked her why shed behaved so abominably, she pointed at a little kitten nearby, which weirdly was allowed to hang out with her for some reason, and signed: The cat did it.

Koko did to that keeper exactly what Bush and Blair did to you and me. She told him a patently absurd and laughable lie. But instead of doing what the keeper did and say, Yeah, right, Koko, youre nuts, stop lying, we listened to the apes. We allowed Bush and Blair to take us to war; in fact, if the people of Britain and America had been that keeper, wed have got Koko a gun and stood back and watched while that big bully of an ape shot the cat.

You know all those nasty jokes about Bush looking like a monkey? Well, he can certainly lie like one, thats for sure. His knee-jerk ability to tell a whopper at the drop of a Stetson really does appear to be shared by actual simians as Koko proves.

You have been lied to about Iraq on a daily basis by the British and American governments since before September 11, 2001. These werent little accidental lies. Oh no, sir. These were big, fat, stonking, great lies of historic proportions they were Koko-sized lies.

Today, we all know that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and that we invaded and beat up an entire country based on the lies of our leaders.

But our leaders didnt just lie to us. They terrified us with spectres of mushroom clouds; they attacked our patriotism if we questioned them; they insulted our intelligence if we said we doubted them; they mocked our reservations; they withheld information; suppressed facts; invented threats and deceived us into backing an illegal war which has left tens of thousands of Iraqis, Britons and Americans who should still be alive and with their families very, very dead indeed.

They only gave us half the facts and half the story. Sure, Saddam once had weapons of mass destruction back before the First Gulf War but his amazing weapons of doom were all long gone by the time the March 2003 invasion started.

And sure, Saddam was a moustachioed madman, a genocidal loon, a lover of rape rooms, torture chambers and mass graves, but what the hell has been going on in Abu Ghraib prison and that gulag over in Guantanamo Bay? I dont remember anything being agreed that said the democratic liberation of Iraq was dependent on some Iraqis being forced to masturbate with womens knickers on their heads, or beaten to death, or savaged with dogs, or covered in their own shit, or disappeared, or raped.

Again, we got half the story. Bush and Blair made out that Saddam was Darth Vader. They may as well have said that he had a Death Star and it was pointed right at us thats how absurd their lies actually were. As a by-product of their lies they have crippled our intelligence services by forcing our spies to corrupt themselves and back up false government propaganda. In doing so, they have left our two countries more vulnerable than at any time since the Second World War. Just look to the Islamist atrocities in London in July of 2005 for proof of how this war has brought pointless religion-fuelled terror to our own doorsteps. If MI6 or the CIA found out that Krazy Kim over in North Korea had decided that he was a bit bored with life and so fancied topping himself and taking us all with him in a nuclear Armageddon, who would believe them? Would you? And Bush and Blair are the men who say that they want to make us safe and secure. The money-shot of this war was billed by our leaders as the denouement of a struggle which would end with the world as a safer place. Tell that to London commuters.

We were mentally drugged with made-up phantoms, with half-truths, exaggerations, omissions and downright lies.

How dare these politicians who are servants of the people who have their wages paid for by you and me and every other citizen take our countries to war based on half the facts and half the truth.

This book attempts to fix that disparity. Im going to give you the other half of the story. And Im going to give it to you in the same unremitting fashion that Bush and Blair and their supporters and cheerleaders in the right-wing establishment press on both sides of the Atlantic gave you their case for war. They werent kind to those who opposed them; they insulted their enemies; they mocked the opinions of anyone who differed with them; they humiliated and beat up on their opponents wilfully and cruelly; they lied openly about any person who had the temerity to challenge them or call them on their lies. So, its pay-back time. On your behalf you who were lied to, misled, told only half the tale, mocked and humiliated for your doubts I am going to give them back exactly what they handed out to the doubters in the first place. Im a big believer in the principle of do as thy would be done to. They did things to people that were wrong; they lied; so its only fair that they are called on their lies and have done to them things which they dont like in return.

I spent the best part of four years researching this book as a newspaper investigative journalist. This book is chock full of facts one hundred per cent indisputable facts. Where claims are in doubt, I make clear they are in doubt or are speculative but those moments are few and far between. There are hundreds of revelations in this book which prove completely just how duplicitous and corrupt this whole war was and is. I waste little time here rehearsing the arguments that Bush and Blair hollered again and again into our ears since 2002; theyve had their say, and now its time for someone to call them to a reckoning. We know their lying, treacherous claims, and we dont really need to hear them again. This entire book is meant to pull the rug brutally from beneath these liars, to trip them up, to expose them and to shame them for what they are and what they have done. But where they went on the attack with lies, here they are attacked only with the truth. Thats the difference, and that is also the moral measure of these people.