The area around Whitehall and Westminster in central London is full of statues and memorials to sometimes forgotten wars and the generals who fought them. It is unusual, however, to see a memorial to wars which are continuing and which are highly contested. Yet, the latest war memorial in London, put up to commemorate the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, is exactly that. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has been unveiled against a background of rows and controversy. The unveiling of the new memorial took place at a ceremony to which, astonishingly, many of the relatives of those who died were not invited. Some did not even know it was happening. The project was launched by a financial appeal through Anglo-American media magnate Rupert Murdoch's newspaper The Sun, and among those contributing to the cost was the arms company BAE Systems. The sculptor designed a memorial that links military and civilian contributions and that has one of its sides as a jagged edge, supposedly to convey “the harsh, dry, rocky and difficult terrains of the two countries, but also to suggest how the outcomes of both campaigns is not fully resolved, that there was much division within the British people over them.” That may be a valid artistic approach to the sculpture, but it is also a massive understatement about the politics of the wars concerned, to say the least. The Iraq War was the most contested war in British history, and it has been shown by subsequent events to have been an utter failure. The Chilcot Report on the war last summer made it clear that this was an unnecessary and illegal war that former UK prime minister Tony Blair was determined to wage regardless of the facts or public opinion. While the war in Afghanistan was not so contested to begin with, it has also resulted in failure, with the continuing growth of the Taliban, and now the Islamic State (IS) group, in the country. Meanwhile, the people of both countries have suffered and continue to suffer on an unimaginable scale. The continuing opposition to the two wars is not reflected or even acknowledged in any of the official approaches. The omission of many families of the dead from the ceremony in London earlier this month was probably at least in part because of fear of opposition from that quarter. But it beggars belief that despite the trashing of his reputation by the Chilcot Report last summer the architect of the Iraq War, Tony Blair, was one of the VIPs who made it onto the guest list. To add insult to injury, the memorial itself contains a Blair lookalike as one of the soldiers represented. Whether Blair will appreciate the likeness, and whether this was by accident or design on the part of the sculptor, the narrative accompanying it reinforces Blair's view of the war as a humanitarian intervention. The current UK Defence Minister Michael Fallon, described it by saying that “the memorial will stand as a permanent reminder of the contribution and sacrifice that so many members of our armed forces, aid workers and civilian personnel made towards the security of the United Kingdom and the interests of Iraq and Afghanistan. Their efforts underline our on-going commitment to support the people of this region in building a more stable future which will help keep Britain safer and more secure.” The Sun described it rather differently as a “memorial to our boys”. To this newspaper and to the British government and military, the memorial is about commemorating war. The two themes of the memorial, “duty and service,” are quite compatible with pro-war sentiment. All deaths in war should be remembered, and our thoughts go out to all the victims of war. But while the number of British military and civilian personnel killed in these two wars are marked in their hundreds, those of Iraqis and Afghans are marked in the tens and hundreds of thousands. We should always remember that these wars are still going on. There are still British military operations in Iraq at huge risk to civilians. Western troops remain operational in Afghanistan. While it is only right to honour those non-military personnel who put themselves in danger in such circumstances, it is also right to point out that the amount spent on aid and reconstruction is a tiny fraction of the amount spent on military invasions and occupations in these centuries. The attempt to draw a line under these wars, and to sanitise their consequences, has been much in evidence in recent years. When the UK's Prince Harry quoted the Biblical phrase that there is “a time for war and a time for peace” at the ceremony to inaugurate the monument, he omitted to mention that today is not a time of peace. There is no peace in the Middle East and South Asia. Nor is there anything close to it. The threat of terrorism in the West has grown in the past decade-and-a-half since the wars began. We should never forget those who have died in these two wars. But we should never forget the hypocrisy and deceit of those like Blair who took us into them and continue to justify them. We should not allow their history to be rewritten in terms of humanitarian intervention, when they were nothing of the sort. The writer is convenor of the UK Stop the War Coalition.
