Iraq is the shameful secret in our cellar

British media coverage of the horrendous Josef Fritzl incest case has frequently raised the question of whether Austria has become a 'lookaway society'. Such portrayals rest on the assumption that British society is somehow more caring and morally responsive.

But Britain's continued refusal to acknowledge the full implications of the Iraq war tells a different story. Even as Gordon Brown deliberates whether to withdraw British troops from Basra, there is a glaring discrepancy between the scale of the catastrophe generated by the invasion and the public response to it.

This is a war in which up to one million people may have died, 2m Iraqis have become refugees and another 2.77 million are internally displaced. It is a war that has cost up to three trillion dollars, some $23bn of which have never been accounted for, in which 25,000 Iraqis are currently held without charge or trial.
 
These truly staggering statistics have tended to receive a muted reception in the countries most responsible. In a damning report this month,  Amnesty International accused Western governments of an apathetic response to the refugee crisis.

Such indifference has been particularly striking in Britain, where the Government continues to repatriate refugees and asylum-seekers on the grounds that Iraq is a safe country. Even Iraqi translators who worked with British armed forces have only reluctantly been granted asylum, after the MoD finally overcame its reluctance to create a 'precedent' by allowing them in.  

These refugees have often met with a less than hospitable reception from the country they risked their lives for. This month the Times reported that Iraqi translators housed on a Glasgow estate were being spat on and attacked by local residents. On June 8 two Iraqi refugees were arrested in a Cardiff park on terrorism charges because they filmed themselves with a mobile phone with an Arabic ring-tone.
 
All these events form part of the greatest foreign policy debacle in British history. At worst its principal architects may be guilty of war crimes and violations of the Geneva Conventions. At the very least they have shown incompetence and criminal negligence on a truly monumental scale.

For the last decade alleged failure in the public services has been relentlessly subjected to punitive micro-management by a bullying New Labour government. Yet not a single individual responsible for the Iraq invasion has paid any significant price for a failure of epic magnitude.
 
The unquestioning support of the war by so many politicians partly explains why the government has been allowed to get away with it. But the British media have also failed to acknowledge the implications of a catastrophe that their uncritical coverage did so much to facilitate. With a few honourable exceptions, the media consensus has tended to reproduce official explanations of the war as a noble attempt to export democracy or a 'mistake' based on 'wrong' WMD intelligence.
 
At present the US is trying to enforce a security agreement on the Maliki government that is opposed by virtually all Iraqi political factions as a violation of Iraq's sovereignty. Little of this has been reflected in the coverage of George Bush's visit. Instead columnists and TV pundits have pontificated on the choice of menu at Bush's Downing Street dinner, on whether Brown's body language reflects a different relationship with Bush than the US president's 'soulmate' Tony Blair, or whether the withdrawal of British troops will hinder the objective to 'get Iraq back on its feet'.    

All this has disturbing implications for Britain itself. In effect, Iraq has become the shameful and dirty secret in our own cellar, and until the British public acknowledges its full horror and holds those responsible to account, its democratic institutions will remain moribund and corrupt and its moral pretensions as vacuous and fraudulent as those of its erstwhile ally. ·