The Chilcot Inquiry is now the 5th inquiry linked to the Iraq War. Six years after the invasion and despite the withdrawal of British forces, the conflict continues to haunt the British ruling class.

Five years after the USA, assisted by Britain and a few other countries, successfully invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam in only three weeks, nothing is going according to plan. Of course we can read about an improvement in the security situation following the troop surge... But events on the ground have well and truly drowned out any celebration of the original victory.

We have received this leaflet against the Turkish army's current "Operation" in Kurdistan, distributed in Turkey by the comrades of the EKS.

The working class in Britain is daily faced with its sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and friends in the armed forces being sucked ever deeper in to what appears to be a growing series of wars. The chaos in Iraq is rejoined by the revival of conflict and casualties in Afghanistan, although the full extent of the victims of war is deliberately hidden by the state, which does not report the number of injured.

Wednesday 18 April was an ordinary day in Baghdad. Like virtually every other day of the week, there were bombs. These killed over 190 people, many of them women and children. As so often before, the main target was a market, al-Sadriyah, very close to a building site employing workers who were risking their lives to earn a miserable wage to help their families survive. These attacks, among the most bloody since the fall of Saddam in 2003, were carried out in the same market which was hit on 3 February, killing 130 people. The aim of those who perpetrate such crimes is to kill as many people as they can. The purpose is destruction, the annihilation of human beings whose very existence makes them enemies. This is the rule of bestial hatred; this is a society in profound decomposition.

The dramatic situation of a Middle East that has been plunged into chaos reveals the profound cynicism and duplicity of the bourgeoisie in all countries. Each one of them pretends that it wants to bring peace, justice and democracy to the populations who have been subjected to daily horrors and massacres for years. But their fine speeches are just a mask for the defence of sordid imperialist interests and a justification for military and diplomatic interventions which are the main cause behind today's worsening conflicts.

The judgment and execution of Saddam Hussein were hailed by Bush as a “victory for democracy”. There’s some truth in this: the bourgeoisie has so often justified its crimes in the name of democracy (see International Review 66, 1991, ‘The massacres and crimes of the great democracies’). With boundless cynicism, Bush also announced on 5 November 2006, when he himself was in Nebraska in the middle of an election campaign, that the death sentence handed out to Saddam was “a justification for the sacrifices willingly accepted by the US forces” since March 2003 in Iraq.

In his address to the nation on January 10th, Pres. George Bush completely rejected the central recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, ignored the political meaning of the Republican electoral defeat in November, and escalated the war in Iraq by sending more troops and threatening hostilities against Iran and Syria...

In defence of proletarian internationalism against the barbarity of capitalist war.

The credibility of the US forces as protectors of the Iraqi population took another hammer blow with the allegations of an ‘Iraqi My Lai’, in which US marines are accused of running amok after a roadside bomb attack in Haditha last November, slaughtering 24 defenceless Iraqi men, women and children... The ‘humanitarian’ pretexts for the US invasion are being exposed as worthless lies.

Three years after the US-led invasion of Iraq the country is in chaos. Following the destruction of the mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shia shrines, there was a whole series of reprisals, an increasing cycle of violence in which hundreds died. Media speculations on the ‘possibility’ of civil war are already behind the situation.

This leaflet was distributed by the ICC at the mass demonstration in Washington, DC against the war in Iraq. The leaflet offers a revolutionary Marxist perspective on the reasons for the war, in contrast both to the official government explanation and the confusions and obfuscations offered by the leftists, who function as the extreme leftwing of the bourgeoisie.

If you are going to be at the demonstration in Washington, or in any other towns, and you agree with the positions that this leaflet defends, then print off the attached PDF file and distribute it yourself.

If we were to identify a vice that is characteristic of each epoch of human history, it would certainly be the hypocrisy of the ruling class that would fit the bill in the case of capitalism. The great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan, amassed piles of skulls when he conquered towns that had not submitted to him. But he never claimed to do it for the good of their inhabitants. It took bourgeois capitalist democracy to teach us that war is "humanitarian" and that it is necessary to bomb civilian populations in order to bring… peace and freedom to these very populations.

In WR 284 we said that the election campaign had been “filled with attacks on Tony Blair for his dishonesty in taking Britain to war in Iraq, for leaning on the Attorney General to give legal advice in favour of launching the invasion. This has undoubtedly been a message to the PM that an election victory should not be seen as a reason to stay in office personally...