Mr Corbyn’s backing comes after John Prescott, the deputy prime minister at the time of the invasion, said Mr Blair had led Parliament into backing an illegal war.
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Tony Blair faced harsh criticism in the 2.6 million word Chilcot report, with the inquiry concluding the legal basis for taking Britain into the Iraq War was “far from satisfactory”.
Prescott said Blair’s statement that “I am with you, whatever” in a message to US President George W Bush, months before the invasion in March 2003, was “devastating”.
Discussing the Chilcot report’s findings on failures to prepare for post-Saddam Iraq, the Halton MP said: “I certainly have regrets over the fact that the post-invasion plan was clearly flawed and that the Americans made a decision to disband the Iraq security services and police, putting tens of thousands of men without jobs onto the streets”.
Former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Deputy Prime Minister, Lord John Prescott speaks during a visit to an amateur boxing club in Redcar, England, May 1, 2015.
Prescott said he now agreed “with great sadness and anger” with former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan that the war was illegal. “With great sadness and anger, I now believe him to be right”, Prescott wrote in a piece to be published in the Sunday Mirror newspaper.
“No documentation was provided” to justify Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s reasoning that it was “legal to act militarily against Iraq”, he added. I think Tony Blair has been put, rightly, through the mill about the decisions he took.
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said he was likely to back the motion against his predecessor, because Parliament was denied information in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. Unable to hold back the tears, the sister of one soldier who was killed in Iraq aged 19, called Mr Blair “the world’s worst terrorist”.
He said unlike Mr Blair he had now come to the conclusion that the war was illegal.
“The first was that he misled Parliament, or lied to Parliament”.
The Chilcot report, he added, was a “damning indictment of how the Blair government handled the war – and I take my fair share of blame”. “Military action at that time was not a last resort”.
“Parliament must hold to account, including Tony Blair, those who took us into this particularly war – that is surely what parliamentary democracy is about”.
Mr Davis said today that he had made a decision to put the motion forward after the Chilcot report delivered a devastating verdict on Mr Blair last week. The Chilcot report makes it clear that Blair and his allies misrepresented and over-stated the intelligence case, which is precisely what Blix said to Blair before the invasion was even launched.
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“The timing of the decision was clearly created to endorse an nearly immediate action for us to go to war”.
