Former British prime minister Tony Blair ended an epic six-hour inquisition by the Chilcot inquiry on Friday night by insisting he had “no regrets” over toppling former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, arguing that the world was more secure and that Iraq has replaced “the certainty of suppression” with “the uncertainty of democratic politics.”
Blair blamed “the very near failure of the Iraqi occupation” on Iranian interference, misplaced assumptions and a lack of US troops.
During the long-awaited cross-examination he gave no substantial ground over why he sent 40,000 UK troops to war to disarm Saddam of weapons he did not possess, arguing that if the West had backed off he would have reassembled them as he had the intent and ability to do so.
“I had to take this decision as prime minister. It was a huge responsibility then and there is not a single day that passes by that I do not think about that responsibility, and so I should,” Blair said.
Faced with the charge that 100,0000 Iraqi civilians had lost their lives owing to cavalier planning, he said: “I genuinely believe that if we had left Saddam in power, even with what we know now, we would still have had to deal with him in circumstances when the threat was worse, and possibly in circumstances when it was hard to mobilize any support for dealing with that threat.
“In the end, it was divisive, and I am sorry about that, and I did my level best to try to bring people back together again,” he said.
Asked in the final minute if he had regrets, he replied without reference to the families of dead British soldiers listening in the room: “Responsibility — but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein. I think he was a monster.”
As he left the room there were shouts of “you are a liar and a murderer.”
During the day the thoroughly briefed Blair seemed able to handle the five-strong inquiry team with ease, but he was forced to concede in the late afternoon to many failures in British post-war planning, and fundamental disagreements with the US over strategy.
He also tried to minimize the intelligence community’s mistaken assessment in 2002 that Saddam possessed a growing threat by insisting Saddam did have the capability and intent to produce weapons of mass destruction and would have reconstituted that capability if the international community had not enforced UN resolutions in 2003 by removing him from power.
In his newest, if necessarily hypothetical, argument in defense of the war, he contended: “Don’t ask the March 2003 question, but ask the March 2010 question. Suppose we backed off. What we now know is that he retained absolutely the intent and intellectual know-how to restart a nuclear and chemical weapons program when weapons inspectors were out and the sanctions were changed.”
Saddam would have been emboldened, backed by an oil price of US$100 a barrel.
“This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It’s a decision. And the decision I had to take was could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programs or is that a risk that it would be irresponsible to take?” he said.
Blair said he had never entered a secret pact with then-US president George W. Bush in the spring of 2002 to commit the UK to regime change in Iraq. He said his objective throughout had been to disarm Saddam of weapons of mass destruction through diplomacy but backed by force.
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