- 20 years ago, the US and UK invaded Iraq. Today, Tony Blair is free to go on television, has made a huge amount of money, the same with George Bush. At the same time, Julian Assange languishes in Belmarsh prison because he told the truth about this war. There is something deeply wrong with a society with those kind of priorities. When you look at the people who brought us the war in Iraq, the people who used everything at their disposal, the state machine, parliament, the media, when you look at what all those people did, nobody has faced any of the consequences. Even when the Chilcot Report reported, Tony Blair sat up his own press conference, paid for by the immense wealth which he now has, the many houses that he has. He was made envoy for peace in the Middle East, he was given a knighthood last year. Whereas all the people who told the truth about the war, the people who marched, what happened to them? The Muslim community penalised by the prevent system, for telling the truth and for standing up for their rights.

The people like Julian Assange imprisoning Belmarsh for all these years for telling the truth. I remember Tony Blair, the day of February the 15th, when we had so many people marching in London. He said, "Even if a million people march in London, that's not as many as Saddam Hussein killed." Well, the war in Iraq ended up killing more people. He talked about human rights, this is about democracy, it's about getting rid of a dictatorship. After he stopped being prime minister, what did he spend his time doing? Advising dictators. The truth is, all of these were lies. All of them were things where they said, "We are going to make things better." And actually, they made it worse. And not just in Iraq. In the last 20 years, armament worldwide, amount of money spent on military has doubled. Nearly $2 trillion are now spent on arms every year, making the world a much more dangerous place. We've now got conflict, not just between dictator in the Middle East and the biggest imperial power in the world, the United States. We've now got effectively a proxy war in Ukraine between two major imperial powers and both of them with nuclear arms. We've got the much more real possibility of war with China. Again, this will be a nuclear war and therefore the devastation of humanity. So exactly the opposite of what we were told 20 years ago has turned out to be the case. It's a more dangerous world.

Iraq's a much more dangerous place. We have far more refugees than we had then. Taliban in Afghanistan, back in control. Terrorism has grown. And indeed, where did ISIS and Al-Qaeda come from? Well, in Iraq, they came from British-occupied Basra province, where they were formed in prison, where many Iraqis were imprisoned. And the shameful thing is that the people who created the war are still being given awards, are still making huge amounts of money. And in the case of Tony Blair is still being invited onto the BBC to give his views on absolutely everything, instead of being in the dock at the Hague, which is where I think most people in Britain would like him to be. From the very beginning, from the time he went to Bush's ranch in the spring of 2002, Tony Blair was absolutely fully committed to every aspect of the war in Iraq. He lied about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, which had never been found because they didn't exist. And there were all sorts of people who said so at the time, including the UN weapons inspectors, who you might think would be people who did have some particular knowledge about this. This was all dismissed by Blair, by Alastair Campbell, when they devised a dossier. And this is the man who promoted the dossier. Over the Evening Standard that day, Iraq can attack Britain in 45 minutes. I think a period of silence from Alastair Campbell would be welcomed by everybody, instead of which he seems to be in podcasts and on couches all over the TV studios. This tells you something about the lack of integrity and the lack of morals of so much of our media coverage. I think the media role was very, very important. And again, that hasn't really been held to account at all.

If you look at the broadcast media, particularly the BBC, it was an absolute disgrace. I remember Andrew Marr, who was the political correspondent, who just after the war started said Tony Blair had won this argument. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result. 20 years on this is so important because it's not just about the past, it's not just about the present, it's also about the future. And this question of war is going to become a bigger and bigger question over the next two or three years. The project for a new American century was essentially about trying to redraw the world on pro-US lines. American hegemony had to be maintained and had to be extended. Many of Bush's key advisers were people who were part of that project. They could see that China was a rising power. It's a rising power economically. It was also becoming a major military power. China is today the second biggest military power in the world. It has long been a permanent member of the UN Security Council and it has long been a nuclear power. So the project saw the threat of China as a very real one. They wanted to change the politics of the Far East, of the Pacific in terms of the rise of China and to strengthen the United States in that region. They also wanted to redraw the politics of the Middle East and that particularly meant boosting Saudi Arabia and Israel as their two closest allies in the region against Iraq and against Iran. And that's a policy that has continued. The Middle East itself, there are very few democratic governments. And that is to do with the way in which imperial powers decided on a particular form of government which really didn't care about democracy. They were concerned with having regimes which were closely connected to them politically, economically and militarily.

And that's what's been created. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a dictator. He was a dictator who was put into power through the acts of the United States. But he was by no means unique in that region. Saudi Arabia, for example, has been engaged in a war against Yemen for seven years. No question about regime change. The murder of a journalist carried out at the behest of members of the Saudi royal family. Nothing is done. You know, we're talking here about extremely undemocratic states. The British government, the United States governments are perfectly happy to work with those people as long as they keep the area secure for oil profits. That's the bottom line. We had many, many Iraqis in this country who campaigned with us against the war in Iraq. Not because they liked Saddam. Actually, they had suffered. They'd been put in prison. They'd suffered terrible torture. They'd suffered all sorts of things at his hands. So they knew exactly what was going on. But they also knew that the war was not going to make it better for ordinary Iraqis. Actually, it would mean, as it has meant, a breakup of the country, a complete destruction of lives, of livelihoods, of huge numbers of refugees who are treated appallingly when they get to any of the countries that were involved in the war. The impact of things like depleted uranium, all sorts of terrible things that the Iraqi people have suffered.

Perhaps the most shocking one was the revelation of what happened in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib, where American troops were torturing people, were photographing them in the most degrading way, were treating them like animals, were doing all these sorts of things. This is not only in contravention of every international legal agreement about the way in which prisoners of war or indeed any prisoners should be treated. It also told you exactly what the occupation was about. The occupation was about repression and cruelty and putting down the people who dared to stand up against the American invasion. And Abu Ghraib showed that in the most terrific terms. But you know, you can't separate a brutal war, shock and awe, the bombing of cities which took place, the invasion, the cruelty, the siege of Fallujah, all these things that went on. You can't separate that from the repression that followed. They're very much part of the same thing. And if you're invading a country and occupying a country, one of the things you have to do is to dehumanise the population that you're occupying because you have to justify what you're doing. And that's what they did. War is embedded in the kind of society we live in. We live in a society which is imperialist, which is about conquering other countries and extracting money from other countries. We live in a society where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So they don't care about whether your hospital is crumbling. They don't care if the roof of your children's school is leaking. They don't care if you can't afford to heat or eat and you have to choose. Or maybe these days you can't even afford both. They really don't care about those things. What they do care about is preserving their wealth and power and their ability to spread that wealth and power. And war and weapons are absolutely central to their ability to do so. This is locked into their system and that's why they do it. And that's why we have to fight against it. We've got a mainstream media which is really not open to any views which don't coincide with a very, very narrow consensus.

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