 The war in Iraq was probably one of the most extreme examples that we've seen of the way in which the military industrial complex or the national security elite, if you will, that controls the war economy in the United States comes together not only with devastating consequences in the country concerned in this case Iraq, but also to achieve massive profits on the basis of lies that they tell to the American public and to the global public. So in the case of Iraq, it's perhaps best exemplified by Dick Cheney himself, who was so instrumental in the decision to invade Iraq, while at the same time benefiting enormously from the invasion, both its military aspects and its energy aspects. Let me give you some indication. Dick Cheney, as I'm sure many of you know, served as Secretary of Defense, then went into the private sector where he was Chief Executive of Halliburton. In that position, Halliburton produced an extremely influential paper in which it informed the Pentagon that effectively the most public of functions, the waging of war, could be privatized. And when he then returned to office as Vice President under George W. Bush, championing the invasion of Iraq based on a series of political and intelligence lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, his own company Halliburton received at least $6 billion of contracts from the Department of Defense, in addition to which they received at least $18 billion of contracts in relation to the repairing of oil wells and the supply of oil from facilities that had been bombed by the Americans themselves. So this is perhaps the most cynical, but the ultimate business model in which you get paid billions for the weaponry that destroys the infrastructure of a country, in this case Iraq, and you then get paid exponentially more billions to repair that infrastructure once you, the United States of America, have taken control of that country. And that really encapsulates the nature of the global arms trade, a trade that brings together governments, corporations, individual politicians, political parties, the military, American control of regions of the world. But in addition to which make billions of dollars for the very same people who are involved in wreaking that destruction in what Lawrence Wilkerson has described as the national security elite. But there's another dimension of it I wish to touch on very briefly. And that is the support the United Kingdom gave to the United States in the invasion of Iraq, in which it became apparent during the Chilcot commission of inquiry in the United Kingdom that Tony Blair had said eight months before he claimed a decision was made to go to war, had said to the Bush administration that he will do whatever it takes to support the United States of America in invading Iraq, regardless of the circumstances. So you had a situation where not only were American politicians lying to the American public, even lying to some senior officials in its own government in order to create the pretext to invade Iraq, but you had its main ally in the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister Tony Blair lying to his cabinet, lying to parliament, and lying to the British public about the extent and timing of his support to the U.S. invasion. And of course, British companies too made vast sums of money in relation to the invasion of Iraq. But perhaps most cynical of all is that Tony Blair himself on leaving office has made tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars out of the very companies who benefited from the decision to invade Iraq. So in addition to the human and political consequences, the utilization and effective raping of the system of governance and war making by the individuals who made those decisions to go to war was perhaps unprecedented until the invasion of Iraq. And therein lies its significance as a symbol of the very, very worst realities of the global arms trade that is so dominated by the United States of America, which after all is the producer of almost 40% of all weaponry in the world.