British Prime Minister Gordon Brown came under fire yesterday for the way he defended his role in the 2003 Iraq invasion, with some commentators saying he had slipped off the hook.
Brown told a public inquiry on Friday it was “the right decision” to go into Iraq and rejected claims he denied funds for the military fight when he was finance minister.
While he distanced himself from military moves or diplomatic negotiations in the run-up to the conflict, he said he had always been fully informed and did everything required of him as chancellor under former prime minister Tony Blair.
However, Lord Charles Guthrie, the head of Britain’s armed forces from 1997 to 2001, said Brown had been “economical with the truth” and “disingenuous” in his testimony to the inquiry, headed by former senior civil servant John Chilcot.
“The problems of being badly equipped in Afghanistan and Iraq began a long time ago, when he was chancellor [of the Exchequer] and unsympathetic to the Ministry of Defence,” Guthrie wrote in the Sun tabloid. “He was throwing money at other departments of state, while giving us as little as he could get away with.”
Newspapers analyzed the performance of both the prime minister and the inquiry panel. The Sun, which backs the opposition Conservatives, called it a “Brownwash.”
“For all his bluster, Mr Brown is not off the hook. He may have bamboozled the dopey Chilcot Inquiry. But in the court of public opinion, he still has serious questions to answer,” Britain’s biggest-selling daily said.
Another right-wing newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, said Brown’s evidence “was less about learning lessons from Iraq than absolving himself of any blame.”
The Financial Times said that the inquiry, “rather than distancing Mr Brown from the war, has implicated him in it — and raised questions about his character … His inability to admit to mistakes is disconcerting, as is his abdication of responsibility.”
Brown’s appearance before the Chilcot inquiry in London was politically sensitive, coming just weeks before a general election expected on May 6.
The conflict, which left 179 British soldiers dead, remains a divisive issue.
Much of the British responsibility for the US-led war has been laid on Blair, who appeared at the inquiry in January.
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