London-Former British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has revealed Sunday his belief that the 2003 Iraq War was “illegal,” days after an inquiry into the war savaged Tony Blair, who was prime minister at the time.
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A motion being tabled by Tory David Davis accusing the former Prime Minister of deceiving MPs has been backed by Jeremy Corbyn and the SNP.
Conservative MP Davis told BBC that the motion would say Blair, 63, held the house in contempt over the 2003 invasion.
The news comes after the release of Chairman Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq War inquiry, a report that took seven years to compile.
“Now, if you look just at the debate alone, there are five different grounds that the House was misled on: three in terms of the weapons of mass destruction, one in terms of the way the UN [Security Council] votes were going and one in terms of the threat [from Iraq]”.
In response to the highly critical report, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he felt “deeply and sincerely the grief and suffering of those who lost ones they loved in Iraq”, referring to 179 British personnel killed in the war, and will “take full responsibility for any mistakes without exception or excuse”.
Mr Blair insisted the sacrifices made by British troops had not been in vain and maintained that it was right to remove Saddam from power.
Tony Blair’s cabinet, Chilcot said, made the decision to join the Iraq invasion “in circumstances that were far from satisfactory”.
The Labour heavyweight used his strongest language yet to condemn Tony Blair’s decision to take party in the Iraq War, a decision he supported at the time.
Jeremy Corbyn, current leader of Blair’s Labour Party, however said the report proved the Iraq War had been an “act of military aggression launched on a false pretext” and was “long regarded as illegal by the overwhelming weight of global opinion”.
“I now apologise sincerely on behalf of my party for the disastrous decision to go to war in Iraq”.
The head of the United Nations weapons inspection team spoke directly to Tony Blair back in February 2003 to cast doubt on the so-called WMD intelligence that Blair built his case for war on.
Mr Price, who is now an AM, was part of a campaign to impeach Mr Blair over Iraq a decade ago.
Prescott also criticized Blair’s way of running his cabinet, saying that it was given “too little paper documentation” to make decisions.
Mr Davis added: ‘Everybody I talk to thinks that there has been, as it were, a trial.
The long-awaited Chilcot report strongly criticised the then Labour leader for the way he secured the 2003 vote in favour of military intervention using “flawed” intelligence and without adequate preparation.
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What most of the world had believed to be true about the rationale of the Iraq invasion, the Chilcot report has confirmed in black and white.
