There is one huge lesson to be learned from the war

It is nearly a decade since she lost him, one of the 179 British servicemen and women killed in the Iraq war.

Last Sunday there was a suicide bombing in Baghdad.

By last night the death toll had risen to 250. This made it the deadliest attack in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion – with Britain, courtesy of Tony Blair, hanging prominently on to President George W Bush’s coat-tails.

Today we ask, yet again: what on earth was it all for?

We are not the only ones.

In the wake of Sir John Chilcot’s highly critical verdict on the Iraq war, every relative of those 179 dead is quite rightly asking the same question.

And the ramifications have been seismic.

So-called Islamic State (Isil) says it carried out Sunday’s suicide attack, which begs all sorts of questions.

Had it not been for the vacuum created when we and the US pulled out of Iraq, and the ensuing civil war, would we ever have seen the rise of the barbarous Isil and its bid to impose a toxic caliphate on huge swathes of the Middle East?

Would the civil war have erupted in Syria sending hundreds of thousands of its citizens fleeing to Europe as refugees?

In turn it appears this ‘migrant crisis’ played a major part in persuading the majority of British voters in last month’s Brexit referendum, to ditch the EU.

At which point we hope some kind of sanity might be restored.

For if there is one lesson to be learned from Chilcot it is that never again should Britain be dragged into invading another country, which poses no threat to us, by the USA with a Republican president surrounded by a posse of neo-con advisors.

Pertinent? Oh yes, should Donald Trump become the next tenant of the White House in January.

Then at least there might be some comfort for Lucie Nowak and the 178 other families still asking: why?