Five years since the invasion of Iraq - What has changed?

Five years since we were first "shocked and awed". What are your personal feelings about the whole thing?

In 1990 when the first Gulf War started, I remember my best friend and I cried on the phone. We thought it was the literal end of the world.

I don't think anyone would blame us if we did the same now, for slightly different reasons.

I heard a montage of clips on Morning Ireland (?) this morning and got that same sinking feeling of dread all over again. It has cost as much almost as WW2. 100,000 Iraqis dead and 4,000 of the other lot. I can't see that anything else has been achieved except to destroy beyond repair the credibility of the Bush and Blair administrations, the Irish administration for it stance on rendition and the stopover, the UN for being utterly useless and ineffective...

Went to the demonstrations five years ago, not expecting them to work but to express my personal fury and make it as difficult as possible for politicians to support it. Saw it as an oil war and a territorial move in relation to Russia and Iran.

Had the interesting experience in the first week of the war of finding the local Labour and SF members refusing to join a lobby of a conference of TDs and MPs because a Labour guy was chairing and it might spoil his big day. Cynical and opportunist.

The dragging down of Iraq from an advanced industrialised and secular country to pre-medieval conditions and the loss of life and degradation of the US participants, mainstreaming of torture, the renactment on larger scale of tactics of dividing communities developed in Ireland has not been good to watch.

The thing that has changed and that I did not anticipate is that the costs of the war would contribute to the collapse of the dollar and to an implosion of the US economy.

I have no doubt that posting on the other site had an effect on public opinion. We are lucky here that we don't have the party hacks blindly defending the likes of Cockroach dining with the Chinese while they kill hundreds. We should continue to speak our minds here about Iraq. The politicians thought Saddam was a great guy when he was buying beef. They thought Clinton was great when he bombed the Christians for 78 days with hundreds of planes and now Bush is great. They would sell their mother for a state car.