Sir John Chilcot published an extensive and comprehensive report on the war after spending seven years evaluating thousands of official documents, interrogating witnesses and questioning politicians, although his mission did not aim to prosecute or recommend charges against anybody.
Advertisement
Australia’s former prime minister joined other Western leaders Thursday in standing by their decisions to go to war in Iraq 13 years ago.
The senior diplomat said Mr Blair wanted more time before taking military action, and argued it would have been “much safer” to grant weapons inspectors in Iraq another six months to carry out their investigations.
Sarah O’Connor’s brother Bob O’Connor was killed when the plane he was travelling in was shot down near Baghdad.
The inquiry into Britain’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 has said the country went to war based on “flawed intelligence” that went unchallenged.
Iraq’s descent into violence and loss of life following the invasion saw 150,000 Iraqis killed by the time most British troops left in 2009. “It always bothered me but I believed that the decision to go into Iraq was justified at the time and I don’t resile from that”.
It said they were working with an “ingrained belief” that the Iraqi dictator Hussein had chemical and biological warfare capabilities which he was hiding from United Nations inspectors and that he was determined to acquire nuclear weapons.
Blair conceded that prewar intelligence turned out to be wrong, and the conflict’s aftermath was “more hostile, protracted and bloody than ever we imagined”.
FILE – President George W. Bush speaks at a campaign rally at the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati. Blair promised – without consulting government colleagues – “I will be with you whatever”.
It records how Mr Bush called Mr Howard on March 18 to make the formal request for Australia to participate in a future military intervention in Iraq.
Chilcot also criticized spy chiefs who failed to ensure their partial intelligence about Saddam’s weapons was not hardened into certainty by government spin. However, during the 2010 Iraq inquiry, he dismissed the notion that political pressure had swayed his advice as “complete nonsense”.
The report underscored the importance of collective ministerial decision-making and frank discussion and debate. The country remains plagued by violence, seen most recently in Sunday’s vehicle bomb in Baghdad that killed more than 200 people.
Advertisement
“Maybe it was too great an ambition to try to simply dismantle a quite sophisticated country with a long-established civilisation, traditions and cultures of its own and recreate a sort of mid-Atlantic construct of what governance should look like, often going against the grain of local culture and local tradition”, said Mr Hammond.
