The report, the official investigation into the UK’s role in the war, has found that Blair – who was the leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007 – pushed Britain into the Iraq War without evidence or plan.
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– The UK planning and preparation for the Iraq war were “wholly inadequate”, Chilcot concludes.
Blair said that in the report there was no falsification or improper use of intelligence, no deception of Cabinet, and no secret commitment to war whether at Crawford Texas in April 2002 or elsewhere.
That was the message from former prime minister Tony Blair during an over two-hour mea culpa on live television soon after the Chilcot report was released on Wednesday, piling more flak on his legacy.
The long-delayed Chilcot report insisted that Saddam posed “no imminent threat” at the time of the invasion, and the war was unleashed on the basis of “flawed” intelligence.
“At the moment the main feeling for me is anger at what’s come out from this report”.
He told David Cameron the three complaints aimed at Mr Blair were that he had misled or lied to Parliament, that intelligence had been doctored and that the war was illegal.
“It wasn’t that I wanted to believe it. I did believe it and one of the reasons for that was because Saddam Hussein had used these weapons against his own people”.
“I think it’s an absurd proposition”, he said. “I may be completely wrong about that”.
And he argues that if Hussein had been left in power he would “have gone back to his [WMD] programmes again”.
“But I believed that the United Nations had successfully contained Saddam and kept him on some sort of leash”.
He went as far as to regret that current MPs did not support intervention in Syria in 2013, saying the decision “really dealt a blow” to Britain’s relationship with the US.
The families could now launch a civil suit against Mr Blair.
Newspaper front pages were scathing, with The Times describing it as “Blair’s private war” and the Daily Mail calling the former prime minister: “A monster of delusion”.
Yesterday, the Chilcot report was published after seven years, £100million and interviews with over 100 witnesses.
“For all of this I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you may ever know or can believe”.
She said his Labour government had done some “amazing things”, but “their reputation has bled to death in the sands of Iraq”.
“There is one terrorist that the world needs to be aware of and his name is Tony Blair, the world’s worst terrorist”, said Sarah O’Connor, the sister of Bob O’Connor who died in Iraq in 2005, at a press conference called by some of the dead soldiers’ families. “There was little appetite to question Lord Goldsmith (Attorney General) about his advice” that the invasion was legal, and “no substantive discussion of the legal issues was recorded”, the report says.
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“We have to learn whatever lessons we can for the future”.
