Five years ago on 18 March, the British parliament had its first historic opportunity to vote on whether to go to war or not. They fluffed it, and only 139 Labour MPs opposed Blair together with a handful of Tories, Lib Dems and Nationalists, and our former Prime Minister got his way, plunging us into war.

That seminal vote in the face of a national demonstration of well over one million people, which represented more than 10 per cent of all Labour voters at the previous general election, demonstrated the hubris and arrogance of Blair.

By using spurious calls for loyalty and arm twisting threats against individual MPs we were involved in a war.

The participation in Bush’s invasion of Iraq put us in the same camp as the US in mounting an illegal invasion, defying the United Nations, and separating us from most other major powers who all saw the dangers and folly of this war.

A couple of months later, George Bush, standing on an aircraft carrier, proclaimed victory in Iraq. He assumed that it would only be a matter of time before Blair and Bush would be riding in open top cars, amid cheering crowds in Baghdad. Historically, the calmest time in Iraq was the few weeks after the invasion, but gradually the attacks on the coalition forces intensified, and car bombings, assassinations increased, as did the violence of the occupying forces, particularly in the Battle of Fallujah.

The insurgents, unknown before the war, became a feature of the battles in Iraq, as politically the whole thing spiralled out of control. All wars have winners and losers. The losers are the three quarters of a million dead in Iraq, the two million trying to survive in shantytowns within Iraq but away from their own homes, and another two million who are trying to survive in Jordan and Syria. The Iraqi death toll is horrific as is the loss of life amongst coalition soldiers from the United States and Britain in particular.

If there are winners in wars, then the biggest prize must go to the United States’ burgeoning defence industry, which has seen the most massive increase in federal spending on arms since 2001, and they continue to receive ever bigger orders from the Pentagon. They are followed by the security and infrastructure companies, who have been handed lucrative contracts to undertake work for the military in Iraq.

The attempted passage of the oil bill through the Iraqi parliament shows the real intentions in relation to the exploitation of the natural resources of Iraq in the long term, even though after five years oil production levels are still way below the levels achieved during the Baathist regime.

This month also marked the 20th anniversary of the chemical attacks on Halabja, when thousands of civilians died as the Iraqi forces dropped gas bombs on an undefended small town. There were protests around the world but the governments of the West ignored them, as did the neo-cons, who 15 years later took us into war. Indeed, less than a year after Halabja, the Baghdad Arms Fair went ahead as normal, selling weapons to the regime.

There have been other losers in this conflict and they are civil liberties in the UK and other western countries, as anti terror legislation gives great power to the evidence of security services being admissible in court, and detention without trial is planned for 42 days for those whom the police suspect of involvement in terrorist activities in any form.

The first casualty of war is truth, as we saw with the Weapons of Mass Destruction argument used by Blair. The second is the loss of thousands of lives in a needless and hopeless war and third, the civil liberties of people in far away countries who are involved in the war.

Tony Blair was eventually forced out of office because of Iraq. Gordon Brown suggested last year he would reduce troop numbers with a view to an eventual withdrawal from Iraq. The troop numbers did come down and are now largely confined to their own barracks in Basra where they are routinely shelled by local insurgent forces. Gordon Brown initially resisted calls for an inquiry, then suggested there would be one but only ‘when the time was right’. He used the ensuing media discussion of this possibility to effectively bury an MoD statement that troop numbers would remain the same or rise again, as instability becomes even worse in Iraq.

The legacy of Iraq is that war has become more likely in other countries. Indeed, the Afghan war which is almost two years older than the Iraq war, is now predicted to last up to 30 years. We are moving into an era of apparently permanent war, in a world crying out for action to protect people from the effects of climate change, poverty, and health inequalities.

Blair lost office because of Iraq but appears to be unrepentant. Gordon Brown seems incapable of even symbolically breaking with Blair’s neo-con foreign policies, and is thus alienating millions of voters, who are looking for something very different. Ironically, in the US where initially the anti-war movement was smaller than its European counterparts, both houses of Congress have voted twice for the withdrawal of troops who only remain there through the Presidential veto, and whilst Clinton and Obama both have limited foreign policy objectives, at every debate, they vie with each other for being the most anti Iraq war. We have now been through nearly seven years of tragedy since 9/11. The legacy of Bush and Blair for the rest of this century will be one of war, waste and destruction because they were not prepared to look in the direction of dealing with injustice and imbalance of power as a response to 9/11.