Blair's Bounty

Who will honour the courage and the sacrifice of the Iraqis who have chosen to remain in their new country?

This morning the news that 51 more Iraqis had been killed and over a hundred injured barely registered in an international media that has become numbed at the regularity of violence and unable or unwilling to challenge the official narrative of success in the country.

The government should be tasked with honouring the military covenant to ensure that wounded soldiers don't have to rely on the former Prime Minister's books for rehabilitation facilities.

Blair should have looked to Iraq, where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, to locate his philanthropy. One simple way of doing this would have been to donate towards hospital facilities in Fallujah, the epicentre of the Iraq war.

The city is enduring a legacy of soaring rates of cancer, which a report described as "similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout." 20,000 of Iraq's 34,000 registered physicians left the country following the invasion, fewer than 2,000 of them have returned since.

Iraqis are the ones suffering the most from Blair's decision making in the past and are in the most desperate need of international genorosity in the present.