The Chilcot Report is being published today. I wonder what that will mean for the world. There is a body of peace philosophy which determines to decide whether there is such a things as a “justified war” and what it is that makes that justification.
The Chilcot Report supposedly is 2.6 million words long – 4.5 times as long as war and peace so they say. I would suggest that being so long makes it not so much a report as a body of evidence that is yet to be summarised and key elements extrapolated. I read that all the people working on the report got paid about €1000 euro a day for the past seven years and obviously they want to show the taxpayer got their money’s worth.
They say that the Iraq war was a key element in the rise of IS and of the 250,000 Iraqis killed, 170,000 were civilians. That is some figure isn’t it. The military lashed into that country with indiscriminate bombing. Each bomb is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Who won from that war – it was the arms manufacturers.
Really we have a world which is held at gunpoint by corporate culture driven by economics and greed. There is a belief that there can be continuous exponential growth but there can’t. There is a point where a balloon bursts, where an obese person can’t get out of bed, where a car is too valuable to take on the road, where a mobile phone gets so big you can’t get it in your pocket. We need to look at this world, see what is being produced needlessly and wasting our limited resources and stop and think; and stop.
