THE Iraq War confirmed that Britain’s ruling establishment is utterly ruthless, dishonest and corrupt. There are also times when it can be divided.

Ruthless, because from “shock and awe” in March 2003 until their main withdrawal from Iraq in 2009, Britain’s armed forces helped obliterate targets across the country in a merciless display of military might.

This was the most extensive deployment of British troops (46,000) since WWII, bigger even than the wars in Malaya (1948-60), Korea (1950-53), Suez (1956), the Falklands (1982), the Gulf (1990-91) and Afghanistan (2001-21).

There are no official casualty figures for the Iraqi population because the attackers and occupiers made no effort to collect or calculate them.

Scientific estimates of the number of violent deaths — excluding those from much of the anti-occupation and sectarian carnage that followed — range from 151,000 (the Iraq Family Health Survey from a small sample) and 276,000 (the PLOS Medical journal) to 601,000 (the Lancet).

Dishonest, because even the dogs in the street know that the main justifications claimed for the war were knowingly untrue. Saddam Hussein’s regime played no part in the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Iraq had no stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the run-up to the invasion, unlike the US and British invaders.

All the other lies and deceptions plied by president George W Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, secretary of state Colin Powell, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and prime minister Tony Blair and his staff flowed from this.

These included the cynical but abortive quest for a UN resolution for throwing down a bent ultimatum to Hussein — Bush and Blair having already set an invasion date, agreeing one year previously to go to war.

The Labour government’s statements and dossiers were based mainly on US and British intelligence reports — and a plagiarised university thesis on the internet — that were inaccurate, distorted and, in some places, nonsense on stilts. The findings of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq were ignored or grossly misrepresented. Inconvenient eyewitness evidence was suppressed.

Four months into the war, former UN weapons inspector and WMD expert Dr David Kelly was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood. He had been outed as the source of a BBC report that one of the British government’s dossiers had indeed been “sexed up.”

Despite a welter of evidence to the contrary, an inquiry led by Lord Brian Hutton — the product of a top public school and Oxbridge, like so many in the political, business, legal and military establishments — cleared the government, its staff and the intelligence services of any significant wrongdoing.

In 2004, the Hutton review — held in secret — of the intelligence on Iraq’s non-existent WMD, dished out criticism with a feather-duster: “more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear,” thereby stretching judgements to their “outer limits.”

Nonetheless, it concluded, nobody was to blame and — far from being sacked — intelligence chief (later “Sir”) John Scarlett should assume his new post as head of MI6.

Former Civil Service chief and Cabinet secretary Lord Butler and his four-strong team — including one Tory and one Labour MP who had both voted for the invasion — had all received a private education.

They also included the ex-chief of defence staff Baron Inge and former top civil servant Sir John Chilcot.

Later, with Iraq immersed in a bloodbath, then-PM Gordon Brown appointed Chilcot to head a more sweeping inquiry into the Iraq war.

Its tightly constrained report was published seven years later, in 2016. The Foreign Office and the US government had fought hard and successfully to block the publication of key official documents.

Even so, the Chilcot Inquiry finally conceded that the case for war was false, based on fabricated legal advice and exaggerated intelligence; peaceful alternatives to war had been ignored as the US and Britain undermined the authority of the UN.

Of course, nobody would do a day in jail for waging such a war of aggression — “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,” according to the international military tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946.

The real aim of the 2003 Iraq war was always regime change, openly proclaimed in the White House and the Pentagon but deceitfully denied in Downing Street. This was part of the infamous Project for the New American Century to reassert US power in the oil-rich Middle East, controlling vital transport routes — and buttressing key US ally and supplicant Israel.

Iraqi dictator Saddam was the wayward US puppet who had cut his strings.

His Ba’ath Party had been helped by the CIA to take power and periodically massacre Iraq’s communists. His regime was armed by the US, Britain, France, Germany, intermittently, the Soviet Union and then Russia.

But Saddam’s forces had seized Kuwait’s oil resources in 1990, to the alarm of other corrupt Middle East dictatorships armed by the West.

Defeated but not deposed in the Gulf war, his reckless adventurism and bogus anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian rhetoric still threatened to destabilise US plans for the “greater Middle East” region from Morocco to Afghanistan.

In pursuit of regime change, Bush and Blair could rely on support from powerful circles in business, the mass media and the state apparatus, including the upper echelons of the military and security forces. The oil and construction companies, the banks and the armaments corporations could smell the profits coming their way.

Only the mass anti-war movement threatened to split the pro-invasion camp.

Labour Cabinet members such as John Prescott, Brown and Jack Straw shared the doubts of some senior civil servants and military chiefs, but their sniff of power and Britain’s subservient relationship with the US mattered more than honesty and human life.

An earlier inquiry into British business links with Iraq and other states had already laid bare the fundamentally corrupt relationship between monopoly capital, the state and their politicians.

In 1996, a four-year inquiry under Lord Chief Justice Scott found that the Thatcher government had misled Parliament and used secrecy laws to abuse its power in the prosecution of the directors of Matrix Churchill, an aerospace machine tools company in Coventry.

Purchased by the Baghdad government, the company had exported dual-purpose machinery to Iraq to help build a “supergun” despite a UN arms embargo in force during the Iran-Iraq war. The Tory government had quietly relaxed its own regulations at US behest, but then denied doing so and — embarrassed by an International Atomic Energy Authority investigation — took the company to court.

The case collapsed when ex-minister Alan Clark admitted he had been “economical with the actualite” in the witness box.

Much of the Scott Report’s documentation remains classified to this day. But some of the evidence given by Gerald James, managing director of an explosives firm secretly penetrated by MI6 agents, has been published elsewhere.

He describes the extensive, covert and democratically unaccountable links between Britain’s arms corporations, particular banks and law firms, military top brass, government ministers, senior diplomats and civil servants, the intelligence services, Nato, the Pentagon and the CIA. Together, in concert, they armed both sides in the Iran-Iraq conflict which cost almost a million lives.

This is the state-military-industrial complex, wider and deeper than that which president Eisenhower warned the US and the world about in 1961. It lies, it corrupts and it kills.

Aggrieved supergun designer Gerald Bull was assassinated on his Brussels doorstep in March 1990, probably by Israeli Mossad agents. Within days, British journalist Jonathan Moyle was murdered in Santiago. He had been investigating covert British-Chilean military exports to Iraq.

The British ruling class has been lying about its foreign and military policies ever since the dawn of the British empire. Today, Britain’s state-military-industrial complex is as powerful as ever, supported by some trade unions and no longer challenged by Labour MPs.

Opposing Nato and British imperialism’s war plans now falls almost entirely to the peace movement — CND, Stop the War, the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, the Peace Assembly affiliated to the World Peace Council — together with the Communist Party and other forces on the left. As Jean-Paul Sartre once explained: “When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.”

Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.