The decision by the ICC has outraged many Britons, especially the families of the 179 soldiers killed during the 8-year conflict, who blame Blair for dragging the country into a needless war.
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With these distractions out of the way, it is to be hoped that there will be a serious debate about the Iraq war, while remembering that it was essentially an American decision and that the Chilcot inquiry was into the British government’s support for it and the role of the British officials and the military in the occupation.
Relatives of the service personnel killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 will get an early sight of a 150-page summary.
“It will be a whitewash”. I’m absolutely disgusted. I’m not going because it will be a whitewash. But there has been much argument between Chilcot and the government about what exactly the inquiry can publish, particularly concerning Tony Blair’s discussions with President George W Bush.
‘The drama would not have been complete, however, without the character of George Bush and his special relationship with Blair, and that kick-ass phonecall I overheard’.
Janice Procter, whose 18-year-old son Michael Tench was killed in 2007, said “It’s been horrendous, I’m very apprehensive about this”.
Impeachment is a law that was last used in 1806 and is considered obsolete, but could be revived to put a symbolic mark on Blair’s reputation in the history books.
She said “it can not be on one man’s say so”.
“I’m quite apprehensive at the moment”.
“People say this should bring closure but it won’t”.
He said: ‘Of course Blair and everyone else will say no we didn’t make the decision until right up to it. You can always say that can’t you.
Roger Bacon, whose son Matthew, 34, was killed in 2005, said: “It’s been hanging over our heads – a great rock sitting over our heads and it wears you down, no doubt about it, and has worn us down for a long time”.
On March 20, 2003, Britain went to war in Iraq alongside its USA allies.
“The major thing is, how did we get into this mess in the first place?” he added.
That has led to the current leadership, and most of the party membership, drawing all the wrong conclusions because they started out by inputting all the wrong data: Iraq was wrong, Iraq was a policy of Tony Blair’s, X was a policy of Tony Blair’s, therefore X was wrong.
Blair told British MPs before invading Iraq that intelligence showed former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had “active”, “growing” and “up and running” nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. It follows a previous report – the Butler Review – which found that intelligence reports of Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction had been unreliable.
According to Monday´s edition of the the Guardian newspaper, ICC lawyers said the question of whether Blair knowingly mislead the British people in making the case for war against Iraq, was beyond its prosecutorial scope. On Sunday, the former British minister declined to comment further, saying “it’s best we wait for Wednesday and let’s just see what the report brings… then I can respond properly”.
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Iraq descended into sectarian strife after the occupiers dismantled Saddam’s government and military apparatus, unleashing chaos that helped give rise to the Sunni extremist militants of the Islamic State group.
