“I may be completely wrong about that”, Blair said in his BBC interview. Of what I’ve read, it’s only 150 pages, but from what I’ve read, it’s mainly anger.
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“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”.
Blair was harshly criticised in the report on the Iraq war in 2003 for authorising the invasion with flawed intelligence before having exhausted all peaceful options.
Blair acknowledged that, in hindsight, he it would have been better to challenge the intelligence services “more clearly”. “I did believe it and one of the reasons for that was because Saddam Hussein had used these weapons against his own people”.
From the British perspective at least, the decision to topple Saddam Hussein was the effect of an excessive degree of Anglo-American intimacy that distorted the policy-making process in London and ultimately inflicted severe reputational damage on a prime minister who won three successive general elections.
He added however: “I personally don’t know what difference that would have made since he was there around the table”.
Throughout its report, the inquiry, which cost 10 million pounds ($13 million), criticised Blair’s leadership, saying he over-estimated his ability to influence USA decisions on Iraq and took major decisions without consulting his cabinet. “But obviously I can’t say what is the right type of equipment to use on the battlefield”.
And while Blair insists Chilcot proves there was “no secret commitment to war” made during his meeting with George W. Bush in April 2002 in Crawford Texas, the report does show evidence of his continued support for the USA president’s own resolutions.
The long-awaited Chilcot Report is the result of a seven-year inquiry into Britain’s role in the 2003 Iraq War, which led to the downfall of Saddam Hussein.
Chilcot said Britain did not have the capacity to engage in campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and said it was humiliating that the military in 2007 had had to make a deal with a militia that had become dominant in the southern Iraqi city of Basra which Britain was supposed to control.
The report is named after the inquiry’s chairperson and former civil servant Sir John Chilcot.
Although the most vociferous opponents of the Iraq adventure have accused Mr Blair of deliberately misleading Parliament and the British public, Chilcot’s findings suggest that the prime minister was drawn into a dubious undertaking because he was rather too close to the U.S. president.
“This is as clear a statement as Chilcot was permitted to make that the war was illegal”, Monbiot wrote.
Blair “certainly misled us into believing that this [the Iraq war] was for a just and right cause”, he also said.
The Chilcot report found the vehicle they were travelling in “not fit for goal”.
But he said: “I don’t believe this struggle was in vain”. Sir John Chilcot’s exhaustive report does not support it. And more than one million people were displaced.
Mr Hammond resisted pressure from Conservative MP John Baron – a long-standing critic of the Iraq War – to declare on behalf of the Government that the military action had been a mistake.
Prime Minister David Cameron, who voted for war in 2003, told MPs it was important to “really learn the lessons for the future” and to improve the workings of government and how it treats legal advice.
√ War preparations “failed to take into account the magnitude of the task of stabilising, administering and reconstructing Iraq”. Many Ba’athist military officers were now in senior positions within the fighting forces of the Islamic State terror group, he pointed out.
The military mission was undermined by a failure to plan for Iraq’s reconstruction and by a surge in chaos and violence that the invaders should have seen coming, the report said.
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But Mr Chilcot said Mr Blair should have been able to imagine it. There need to be more discussions in the council of power. “But we can not be proud of the way our government has treated them”. That’s not a realistic or perhaps even a desirable outcome.
