Chilcot says “the people of Iraq have suffered greatly”.
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He said the military was fully prepared for the campaign to remove Saddam, but that the terrorist insurgency that followed was “tough”.
He went on to suggest that despite the “terrible consequences” of the invasion – which, as he had been warned, saw Iraq plunged into a bloody sectarian civil war – the British-US military intervention had not been in vain.
Sir John is adamant in his 2.6 million-word report there was no need to go to war in 2003 and that Saddam could have been contained.
The Mirror for instance has led with a damning memo sent to George W. Bush eight months prior to the conflict in which Blair stated “I’ll be with you whatever”, while reporting that the legal case was “far from satisfactory”.
The US administrator to Iraq at the time, Paul Bremer, told the BBC’s Newsnight that British officials had been thoroughly briefed on the strategy for dealing with the Ba’ath party.
The inquiry also found that the decision to invade Iraq was made on “flawed intelligence”, especially with regard to the severity of the threat posed by the country’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
He pleaded for people to stop saying he had lied about the intelligence that formed the basis of the then-Labour government’s decision to follow the USA into Iraq and expressed his “profound regret” to the families of United Kingdom soldiers who had died. “I can’t be in charge of the actual equipment that is needed”, he said.
In a almost two hour-long news conference, the former prime minister said he still believes he acted in “good faith” and that the decision was the “hardest, most momentous, most agonizing” one he ever took.
“Difficult decisions were made in good faith, based on the evidence available at the time – and only after strenuous efforts had been made by me and many others to pursue a diplomatic resolution”.
He argued that had Saddam Hussein been left in power, “he would have gone back to his [weapons of mass destruction] programmes again”.
Instead, Mr Blair said, Iraq had a government “accepted as legitimate, the product of an election”.
Humphrys suggested some people thought Mr Blair was deluded.
He added: “I never expected to end up being prime minister in a time of war”.
Colonel Mansoor described the Iraq War as one of the biggest mistakes in American History and praised the British government for launching the inquiry.
“It’s not about attacking Tony Blair personally”, the shadow health secretary said.
“The invasion and subsequent instability in Iraq had, by July 2009, also resulted in the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqis – and probably many more – majority civilians”.
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He says the flawed decision created a domino effect in the region for which leaders like Howard bear responsibility.
