The tragic irony of war was not lost on me this week.
When standing rigidly together, side by side on the beaches of Normandy, our Western leaders saluted veterans to the emotive notes of The Last Post while 6,500 miles away Iraq was ignored and left to bleed as fanatical Islamic forces ripped through it.
Gum chewing US President No-Bammer may have made the speech of his life, PM Cameron tried to, French President Hollande finally pulled up his zip and looked the part while Chancellor Merkel just looked awkward, but at this very poignant time they were all guilty of abandoning Iraq and its people.
They are leaving them to suffer yet more anarchy and slaughter.
The feared leader of the extremist army is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi a man who makes Saddam Hussein look like Mother Teresa. Hanging Gardens of Babylon? They should hang their heads in shame!
The 2004 Gulf War may have been illegal, but I, like many others at the time, agreed that Saddam should be toppled but only if the aims of an invasion were going to bring freedom and democracy to the long suffering Iraqi people, not make it even more divisive, dangerous and alone.
The cost of that ill thought out and unanswerable war has been truly horrific.
Some estimates put Iraqi casualties at more than 400,000 and those among Allied forces at more than 5,000, while the financial cost of trying to repair the damage and stabilise the country has been reckoned to be nearly $1.7 trillion, rising to a jaw dropping $6 trillion over the next 30 years.
And yet there’s still no peace, nor any likelihood of one ever being achieved, especially now we have pulled the troops out and left Iraq to its grisly fate.
War, as they say, is very good for making a buck and many large institutions did very well out of it. None more so than uncaring ex US Vice President Dick Chaney, whose former company Halliburton reaped $39bn from the country.
Well he did say it was one of the few countries in the world, given its oil wealth, that could afford to rebuild itself and he was the most vocal supporter of sending the troops in.
Veritus Capitol / DynCorp has made around $1.44bn retraining Iraq’s lamentable police force and UK company AEGIS managed to get in on the act, taking around £430 million for private security operations.
But what should be done now?
Well don’t expect any real decisive action from our craven leadership any time soon. As the other unfolding tragedy in Syria clearly showed, their appetite for military intervention dangerously waned just as the Jihadists’ appetite for destruction increased. They knew the West wasn’t going to stop them and seized the chance to get away with murder on a cataclysmic scale.
As uncomfortable as this may sound, and as much as I don’t want to see another Allied troop lost, we cannot just stand back and allow Iraq, Syria and others to fall into the hands of these evil, crazed cretins. We cannot allow the despicable butchering, maiming and displacement of civilians to continue, especially when we are at fault for creating this unholy mess in the first place.
For the sake of those poor, unprotected millions the UN and NATO must go back and finish the job with all and any means necessary. Not stand idly washing their hands in their blood.
After all, was that not what D-Day was all about fighting for freedom and democracy?
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