DAVID CAMERON is playing politics when he expresses his “frustration” at the delays to publication of the Chilcot inquiry into the war of aggression against Iraq.

The Prime Minister seeks to blame Labour for delays in setting the inquiry up in the first place — but that was six years ago. A late start cannot explain the extraordinary length of time that Sir John Chilcot has taken coming to his conclusions.

Mr Cameron no doubt wishes that publication could take place before May so that he could use it to embarrass the Labour Party before the election.

But Ed Miliband is quite right to point out that he was an opponent of the 2003 invasion, while the current PM supported it.

Labour should therefore make common cause with all forces pushing for faster publication of the report, however cynical some of their motives may be.

Because this is no ordinary inquiry. Former PM Tony Blair may continue to insist, as he did yesterday, that the war was justified and has nothing to do with the explosion of terrorist activity that followed it.

He is also fond of telling his critics it is time to “move on” from Iraq, a view spouted by Establishment goons of various stripes in the British press.

But we cannot move on from the war Blair launched with George W Bush. Its consequences are with us today.

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Blair helped start other wars.  

The 1999 attack on Yugoslavia saw civilised norms abandoned when Nato bombed the National Television of Serbia headquarters, killing 16 journalists. Blair, who publicly defended the bombing, has never paid the price of that atrocity, although the hapless station manager later went to jail for failing to evacuate the building.

In 2001, Blair joined the United States in the assault on Afghanistan, supposedly for harbouring Osama bin Laden although Kabul had in fact offered to hand the al-Qaida chief to a neutral country for trial. 

That invasion and occupation dragged on for longer than the first and second world wars combined before Nato occupiers, unable to defeat the Taliban, slunk off in the night with their tails between their legs leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.

But it was the 2003 invasion of Iraq which marked the culmination of Blair’s unprovoked warmongering instincts.

The war toppled a secular dictatorship, replacing it with an equally brutal sectarian regime under Nouri al-Maliki that tortured and killed its opponents on a massive scale.

The humiliation of foreign occupation combined with the outrages inflicted on Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority proved a lifeline for al-Qaida, which had not previously wielded any influence in Iraq.

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A devastating civil war was deliberately fostered by US and British commanders keen to deflect hostility from their own soldiers. Hundreds of thousands died. 

They are still dying, for Iraq has not had a stable government since 2003. The butchers of Isis who now run rampant through Iraq and Syria — where another secular regime is currently fighting for its life against religious fanatics backed by the West — would never have existed were it not for the invasion and its chaotic, bloody aftermath.

The same twisted logic that saw us unleash hell on Iraq was used to justify the dismemberment of Libya in 2011. That country too is now a war-torn wilderness where people are slaughtered daily for belonging to the “wrong” religion or ethnic group.

The inquiry into how and why the British government got involved in this, the crime of the century, should have been published by now.

But more importantly Britain must make its decisive break with the war and reject a foreign policy of reckless, endless violence.