The best to be said of William Hague is that in accepting that there can be no British military intervention in Iraq he is not quite as bad as Tony Blair.

Both men remain in denial over the indisputable reality that the illegal 2003 US-led invasion laid the basis for Iraq’s current sectarian nightmare.

But while Blair favours aerial bombardment of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) forces in Iraq to support the Nouri al-Maliki government in Baghdad, Hague acknowledges the difficulty of achieving parliamentary approval for this ploy.

Not the least difficult aspect of winning support for such adventurism is that the coalition government failed to carry Parliament for intervention against the Syrian regime, which would have benefited Isis most.

Washington, London and other Nato states condemn Islamist extremist groups but remain silent about their regional allies’ supply of arms and volunteers.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other corrupt medieval kingdoms have their own reasons for wishing to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.

As varied as those reasons may be, the “democratic” justifications touted by Nato leaders find no expression within them. Nor should anyone else give credibility to such notions.

The Iraq war had nothing to do with replacing dictatorship with democracy, leaving aside the bagatelle that invasion to effect regime change is a crime against international law.

That is why Blair was single-minded in insisting that the Saddam Hussein dictatorship was in breach of UN demands that it destroy its weapons of mass destruction, even though he and George W Bush knew them to be non-existent.

Their motivation was Iraq’s immense hydrocarbon assets and issues of imperialist hegemony.

Beheading Saddam’s Baathist regime, which was essentially secular, opened the way for Maliki to head a nominally inclusive government that has proven both corrupt and sectarian.

Kurdish involvement in central government has given way to efforts to establish an independent Kurdish state.

Sunni co-operation with Maliki has been scuppered by waves of state executions of political opponents denounced as “terrorists,” encouraging many Sunnis to embrace the Isil military upsurge.

Washington’s hostility to Iran’s Shiite theocracy is confounded by the reality that these are Maliki’s closest allies, forcing John Kerry to join Hague in consulting Tehran.

As welcome as it is to see world powers prioritising talks, each is more concerned with their own state interests than the plight of the Iraqi people.

The entire region is engulfed in flames because of outside interference and local leaders’ disregard for the human rights of their populations.

Rather than forswear immediate recourse to a bombing campaign in Iraq, imperialist states should remove their dirty hands from the throats of all countries in the region.

Their bullying interference has virtually split Iraq into three, with the Sunni north west of the country linked to Isil-dominated north-east Syria.

The defeat suffered by Nato warmongers as Parliament spurned their offer to make the situation in Syria infinitely worse has to encourage Britain’s politicians to finally learn the lessons they rejected in 2003.

They cannot claim not to have been warned about the likely outcomes. 

The Stop the War Coalition forecast today’s catalogue of catastrophe at a time when warmonger politicians were regarded by media and Parliament as worthy of attention.

They have been exposed as shameless liars and pedlars of conspiracies. Their time is past. Iraq’s future is, as it always was, best left to the Iraqi people.