IT'S been 10 long and bloody years. In fact, in my life it sometimes feels like it's been one long bloody war.
On Saturday, I spoke at the Stop The War - 10 Years On conference in London's Red Lion Square, along with my mentor Tony Benn, who first spoke there in 1956 against the British invasion of another Arab country, Egypt.
Then, as now, we were in league with France and, of course, Israel (some things never change).
Another speaker on Saturday was Tariq Ali, behind whom I - at 14 - marched in London in 1968 when he led the famous demo in Grosvenor Square against the massacre of millions of Vietnamese by the American "leaders of the free world".
Infamously, when millions of our compatriots, amidst straw hats and trumpets, marched off to the trenches of World War I, the adversaries, each led by cousins, one a king, the other an emperor, our leaders told us: "It will all be over by Christmas."
Words to be avoided then, given it lasted four years and left tens of millions dead, blinded, gassed, maimed, widowed, orphaned.
But not by that friend of liberty, Jack Straw. In an exchange of verbal fire with me in early 2002, Straw claimed our soldiers in Afghanistan would be home, the war won, by Christmas.
I warned him then that it would not be won and that our soldiers would still be there "10 Christmases hence".
I remember like it was the script of a Terence Rattigan play. He laughed a long theatrical falsetto laugh, in which the great majority of those present joined in. Oh, how they laughed.
No one's laughing now.
But many are weeping after a bloody few weeks in which American, British, French and Italian soldiers have been going down like flies.
And though no one counts the Afghans (their blood doesn't count like ours. Count the column inches if you don't believe me) they are dying at the rate of 10 of "them" to one of "us". The families of sacrificed poor British infantry are surely now asking, why? If Bin Laden is dead, if al-Qaeda are gone from Afghanistan, as the Pentagon say they are, why are we still there? Why are our darling young sons still coming home stiff and cold to be buried in the ground? One of the architects of the Vietnam slaughter - which included the use of gas and chemical weapons - was the teutonic Dr Strangelove, Henry Kissinger, as Secretary of State to President Richard Nixon during the latter's long descent into madness. And not just Vietnam, of course, but Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, Chile, Argentina...
Indeed, it was said that satire died the day that Dr K got the Nobel Peace Prize - he having the blood of more innocents on his hands than any man alive.
Surely it has died again now that other teutonic creep Sepp Blatter has appointed the same Henry Kissinger to "clean up" FIFA. What'll it be next, appointing Tony Blair as the Middle East Peace Envoy?