Howard made the remarks in response to the release of Britain’s Chilcot Inquiry, which concluded that the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had relied on flawed intelligence in making the decision to go to war. Some chose to boycott the presentation, over fears it would be a whitewash.
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The planning and preparations for Iraq after Hussein, it declared, were “wholly inadequate”.
“The government failed to achieve its stated objectives”. So the terror threat that we face in this country right now is a direct result, a direct result, of the decision by the Australian government under John Howard in 2003 to join in that invasion.
“Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated”, the report’s author Sir John Chilcot said.
Milngavie and Bearsden MSP’s have responded to the long awaited findings of the the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War.
Insisting that the “world was and is better off without Saddam”, Mr Blair argued that the Iraqi dictator would have “once again threatened world peace” if he had remained in power.
“The point had not been reached where military action was the last resort”.
The Press and Journal leads with the deaths of two children, whose bodies were pulled from a auto that crashed into a loch near Oban on Wednesday afternoon. He would not apologize tor toppling Hussein, and he would not admit that the lives that were lost had been lost in vain.
The former prime minister, who ignored the will of millions of British people to wage the disastrous war, then made the jaw-dropping claim that: “I understand that people still disagree but at least do me the respect – as I respect your position – of reading my argument”. But he had done his duty from the best of motives.
Looking exhausted, his voice sometimes croaking with emotion, Blair described his decision to join the United States attack as “the hardest, most momentous, most agonising decision I took in 10 years as British prime minister”.
Some things have changed already.
In the report, finally published seven years after the inquiry began and 13 years after British and USA troops invaded Iraq, Chilcot concluded that Britain’s military role in Iraq went “badly wrong” and “ended a long way from success”.
The answer – delivered by the inquiry’s chairman Sir John Chilcot – is no, it wasn’t.
The one man who did apologize to them directly was Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Its Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, said the Australian government took responsibility but wouldn’t be apologising.
Relatives of some of the British soldiers who died in Iraq said they would study the report to examine if there was a legal case to pursue against those responsible.
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Chilcot’s report noted that the Blair government’s public statements about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction were “presented with unjustified certainty”.
