"Everything that the anti-war movement said about this war has proved to be true"
Yes. The loss of thousands of innocent lives, the occupation, the US corporation involvement in reconstruction...

"Despite talk of the "special relationship" between Britain and the US, George Bush clearly doesn't care enough to even release the prisoners from Guantanamo Bay."

I think the Guantanamo Bay issue is important (for justice,civil liberties,freedom). Perhaps the "special relationship" means that the US continues to "detain" the prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. I don't believe that Tony Blair would want to end it. I haven't seen any mention anywhere of any criticism of it by Tony Blair. The government seems to be supporting it now as well.

There is an article here suggesting that the facility at Guantanamo Bay is going to become a more permanent feature.

Growth at base shows firm stand on military detention (24/8/2003)
 http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/6604462.htm
"GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Twenty months after it opened as a short-term solution early in America's war on terrorism, this much-criticized military detention and interrogation camp is evolving from wire mesh to concrete."

There is another article about Guantanamo Bay here:-
U.S. rejects plea on al Qaeda prisoner treatment (29/8/03)
 http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030829/80/e75jo.html

Amnesty International has recently released a report on the Guantanamo Bay situation (also available on the website in .pdf format):-

The threat of a bad example - Undermining international standards as "war on terror" detentions continue
 http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR511142003

"Everything that the anti-war movement said about this war has proved to be true"

Except the predictions of...
...hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties,
...carpet bombing of Baghdad,
...a battle for Baghdad that would look like "Stalingrad on the Euphrates",
...an overwhelming refugee crisis,
...and an ecological catastrophe of oil slicks and oil fires.

"Except the predictions of...
...hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, "

I don't know if anyone specifically in the anti-war movement mentioned that number. I think there may have been a UN agency that mentioned a similar number. Obviously whoever it was they were talking of a worst case scenario based on the fallacy that the Iraqis might have been able to sustain a prolonged defence.

"...carpet bombing of Baghdad, "

Thousands of innocent people have died. It must have happened somehow.

"...a battle for Baghdad that would look like "Stalingrad on the Euphrates", "

???

"...an overwhelming refugee crisis, "

Again based on an unrealistic prolonged war scenario. Again I think there may have been a UN agency that mentioned the possibility.

"...and an ecological catastrophe of oil slicks and oil fires."

There have been some oil pipelines blown up. You forgot to mention the depleted uranium (which has happened).

Hundreds of thousands dead prediction...

You don't know if anyone specifically in the anti-war movement mentioned that number. Try George Galloway:
[ http://www.islamonline.net/english/views/2002/12/article10.shtml]
"...after 60 days and nights of carpet bombing, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis..."

[ http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2716]
"...hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people are now a hair's breadth away from death and mutilation."

[ http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1429_W_809396,00.html]
" German government report due to appear in a newspaper on Monday says that up to two million people could die in a war on Iraq... a quarter of the population in southern Iraq already has no access to drinking water" (in March, before war started, 25% of Southern Iraq had no drinking water.)

[ http://www.iww.org.au/lit/peace/]
" Thousands of men, women and children may already be dead. That number will likely rise to tens of thousands within days, perhaps hundreds of thousands within weeks."

Baghdad's gonna be like Stalingrad prediction...

[ http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk03262003.html] (Robert Fisk himself)
"So what does it feel like to live these days in President Saddam's future Stalingrad? Early yesterday, the cruise missiles and the planes came back... a sobering thought for those of us sitting in the Iraqi capital and only too well aware that the Stalingrad symbolism might turn out to be real."

[ http://www.counterpunch.org/herman03202003.html]
"This weekend, as the bombs fall on Baghdad, stop by your local video store and rent one or both of these movies. Rent either "Stalingrad" if you can find it, which is the more accurate film, directed by Wolfgang Peterson, or the Hollywoodized version of the same battle, called "Enemy at The Gates". Then prepare yourself for what is tragically in store for Baghdad. ... The encirclement of Baghdad, for that is what it is, closely resembles the epic battle of Stalingrad. When the command comes from Bush and Rumsfeld to attack, American and British bombers will pulverize the city in a matter of hours, killing thousands, just as the Luftwaffe leveled Stalingrad and the Russians ruined Grozny. In effect the war with Iraq will be won, but the battle in the ruins of the city may have just have begun. The hellish house-to-house fighting won't be shown on television. ..."


Carpet bombing prediction...

[ http://www.counterpunch.org/damato03072003.html]
"The country that is about to be overwhelmed with cruise missiles and carpet- bombing..."

[ http://www.jerusalemites.org/news/english/mar2003/29a.htm]
"Savage U.S. Carpet-Bombing of Baghdad"

[ http://www.unitedforpeace.org/calendar.php?calid=2392]
"In a plan called Shock and Awe, the United States will launch 600–800 cruise missiles at Iraq in the first two days of the war, carpet-bombing Baghdad and other Iraqi cities."

[ http://www.thisisbolton.co.uk/lancashire/bolton/news/war/WARTOP0.html]
"...Labour MP George Galloway, a strident critic of the Government's policy towards Iraq, draws an analogy with the Allied destruction of Dresden in 1945 which killed around 50,000.
He told the Bolton Evening News: "The carpet bombing will be devastating. This will essentially be another Dresden of Iraqi towns and cities so that when Iraq is invaded there will be as few people as possible left to resist."
The figures are mind-boggling. As respected a body as The World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts a civilian casualty toll in Iraq of half a million..."

Also George Galloway above at islamonline.net.

Thousands of people have been killed: that's true enough. But there was no carpet bombing - nothing even remotely like it. If Baghdad had been carpet bombed then there would be very little of it left and the death toll would be in the hudreds of thousands. For actual carpet bombing look at Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo in WW2.


As far as ecological catastrophe goes, there have been a handful of oil wells set on fire and quickly extinguished, and a couple of pipelines. Nothing on the scale of the oil fires in Kuwait after the 1991 war, when "As much as 6 million barrels of oil a day - almost 10 percent of the world's daily output of oil that year - shot into the air from burning wells. Oil formed huge pools in lowlands, covering fertile croplands. One oil lake in southern Kuwait contained nine times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez spill. Oil, soot, sulfur and acid rain fell on croplands up to 2,000 kilometers from the oil fires."
[ http://www.iht.com/articles/80090.htm] ("Beware an ecological catastrophe in Iraq - Worse than the last time").

So yeah, apart from the hundreds of thousands of dead, the carpet bombing, the ecological catastrophe and the brutal house-by-house fighting (ie: the important predictions) the predictions of the anti-war turned out to be pretty accurate.

I agree,that if the left wants to be taken seriously they should avoid polemic and propaghanda, particularly in equalising historical terms to todays situation, as it makes them only unbleievable.
The speakers should do proper research and not just rant away, as it is done so often, without any personal experience of the side they are talking about.
If somebody can't talk about an issue becuase of the lack of expertise, thy should rather leave it or educate themselves properly or give the change to speak to somebody else.

Can we wait until the war is actually over before adding up how the predictions went?

And Tony Benn with the "hundreds of thousands dead" prediction:

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2670527.stm]
Mr Benn told the crowd: ""What we're about is trying to prevent a war that will kill hundreds of thousands of people many of them children..."

[ http://www.channel4.com/community/showcards/C/C4_News_-_Tony_Benn.html]
"I think the people of Iraq must be free to choose their own leader and they cannot do it while sanctions continue and they are threatened with war which would kill hundreds of thousands. "

The dotster is right! There haven't been hundreds of thousands dead, just a few thousand! It's not as if we in the west would get all carried away and angry just because a few thousand people got blown up!

My main point was that every important prediction made by the anti-war movement turned out to be wrong.

Yes, we killed a few thousand people. I don't know how many, you don't know many. Let's say 10,000 civilian dead in total for the sake of argument. Now that Saddam's government is gone the sanctions are lifted. These, remember, were the sanctions and the government which were "killing 100,000 Iraqis per year". With those gone 10,000 civilians will be saved in 1/10 of a year: just 5 weeks. That means a huge and fast net saving of civilian life.

It is well documented that the problems with aid distribution were due to a non-functioning infrastructure. Now that the infrastructure has been completely demolished, the level of suffering will almost certainly increase, as will the resulting number of fatalities.

Add in the huge number of civilians dying violent deaths under the American occupation. Robert Fisk made an estimate of 1000 such deaths per week.

We should also remember the tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and thouands of Iraqi civilians who died in the initial weeks of the onslaught.

It's certainly possible to pick holes in specific statements from the huge body of anti-war literature. But the main prediction - that the occupation would be a humanitarian, political and economic disaster - turned out to be true, unfortunately.