Where did all the money go?

I am having a rant today.

Today is the 10th Anniversary of the invasion of Iraq which turned out not to have weapons of mass destruction after all, but a band of political tricksters generating false evidence in support of their aims.

Ten years later Iraq is still occupied and there apparently is good reason for this. We dare not leave, not yet, not for a long time. Even after we’ve gone at the end of this year...next year…(?)…we will still be there, providing ‘technical assistance’.

In the ten years of his premiership Tony Blair involved Britain in at least five wars – the second gulf war, Somali, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter of which cost Britain billions – no wonder the coffers are empty. If it was up to him the UK would now be engaged in armed combat in Syria, and probably Libya and Mali.

Today the former premier insists that he has ‘no regrets about deposing Saddam Hussein’. He neatly sidesteps the ensuing carnage and senseless destructiveness that has gone on over ten years. In 1993 he hoped that the ‘war on terror’ in Iraq would be short with minimum loss of life. Ah, the best laid plans of politicians. Nowadays we can no longer identify a terrorist state; the terrorist – destroyers of life, limb and liberty – are individuals who turn up everywhere and anywhere.

For me there is another kind of terrorist: governments – destroyers of dreams and savings. God forbid that I should ever be on the same page as the ‘out of Europe brigade’, but the European Union (EU) does itself no favours. Did it really sanction the Cyprus government's proposed unilateral plunder of the bank accounts of all its citizens, including ordinary hard working people, in order to pay for the profligacy and laxness of the State? Who should pay? As usual, the ordinary man, woman and child who did nothing wrong, while billionaires get away with it.

Apart from money the various European nation states have spent on wars and bailing out rogue banks, what about all the money the EU lavishes on itself, while disparaging whistleblowers?

There is something really smelly going on in the United States of Europe.

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