The invasion of Iraq was foolish, illegal and catastrophic. The only people who seem not to know this are the British rulers. Now that everyone apart from Dick Cheney recognises that the Iraq war has been an appalling failure, and that all the original justifications for the war have long since collapsed, where do those who originally supported it turn? Some just pretend it never happened, or that they really never approved of it.

There is a deafening patter of paws as sundry politicians and pundits rush to the side of this sinking ship, and there have been many displays of selective amnesia worthy of Tony Blair himself. Voices can be heard condemning as criminal folly a war they once praised enthusiastically. A cynic might speculate that if the operation had turned into anything that could plausibly be represented as a success, some of these latter-day peaceniks would now be trumpeting victory and denouncing those who opposed the invasion as faint hearts or traitors. But such about-turns are not so easy for the MPs who voted for the war four years ago. As the British minister Peter Hain says: “No Labour minister, as I was at the time, can shirk responsibility for it.” So what to do, given the scale of disaster and the collapse of original justifications? The answer is a rewriting of history just as dishonest in its way as the original dossiers, or Blair’s claim that Saddam was a “serious and current” threat to this country. Look closely at the answers given last week to the Guardian by the ministers who now aspire to the deputy leadership of the British Labour party, or perhaps higher.

These really boil down to two points. One is that “the intelligence was plain wrong” (Hain) or that “although we now know the intelligence was wrong I think the case for war was made in good faith” (fellow minister Hilary Benn). The other is that the war has had one beneficial outcome: “Removing Saddam Hussein from power was essential for the peace of the region, for the protection of the Iraqi people, and for our own security” (Hazel Blears), or “I don’t regret that Saddam is no longer in power” (Benn). These politicians should begin each day by saying 10 times: We did not go to war to depose Saddam. That was indeed the object of those in Washington who dreamed up the war: destroying Saddam, or regime change for the sake of regime change.

But it was specifically not the purpose of British participation. Blair had been told by his own attorney general that regime change as such was an insufficient legal basis for war. And he knew that even his most servile and corrupt MPs would hesitate to support a war on that basis alone. After all, Blair himself had originally said that we were not fighting to remove Saddam. On October 13 2004, he abused Charles Kennedy and the Liberal Democrats for their opposition to the war. If they had had their way, “Saddam Hussein and his sons would still be running Iraq ... And that is why I took the stand I did,” he said. Malign critics of Blair “insist he tricked, lied and cheated Britain into war”, Stephens laments, “no matter how many objective inquiries say otherwise”.

Even if we hadn’t guessed at the time just how specious the dossiers were, and even if we didn’t suspect that Lord Hutton’s report was a bizarre whitewash consistently at odds with the evidence he had heard, we know what Robin Cook thought about the intelligence when he first saw it: “I was taken aback at how thin the dossier was. There was a striking absence of any recent and alarming firm intelligence.” Above all we have the evidence, as the BBC interviewer John Humphrys reminded Blair on February 22 of the devastating “Downing Street memo” of July 23, 2002. It was written in strictest secrecy summarising the latest meetings in Washington between the heads of British intelligence and their American counterparts.

“There was a perceptible shift in attitude,” the memo says in completely unambiguous words. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” When they read that last sentence, how on earth can these ministers continue to maintain that the “intelligence was wholly wrong”, as though this was an innocent error? We know that Blair committed the country to war long before he ever has admitted, or can admit. We know that parliament and people were deceived by the prime minister and his cabal, willfully but not accidentally, since it would have been politically impossible for this country to have participated in the war if the full truth had been told.

The only people who appear not to know this are our rulers. They cannot acknowledge it, and are obliged to stick to a false account of events. It’s anyone’s guess how long it will be before Iraq recovers from the last four years. And how long it will be before political life in this country recovers from the damage inflicted on it? — The Guardian