Former British prime minister Tony Blair took his nation into a badly planned, woefully executed and legally questionable war in Iraq in 2003, according to the findings of a long-delayed inquiry into Britain’s role in the conflict.
The Chilcot report found that the decision to join the US-led invasion was taken before all other options had been exhausted and on the basis of false intelligence.
Blair faced particular criticism after pledging to support then-US president George W. Bush the year before the invasion “whatever” happened and failing to ensure “there was a flexible, realistic and fully resourced plan.”
Photo: AFP
More than 150,000 Iraqis had died by the time most British troops withdrew in 2009, while 179 British soldiers also lost their lives.
Responding to the report in a short statement, Blair said he had acted in Britain’s “best interests.”
“Whether people agree or disagree with my decision to take military action against [then-Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein, I took it in good faith and in what I believed to be the best interests of the country,” Blair said.
Britain’s scarring experience in Iraq has made it deeply wary of committing ground troops to international military interventions in nations such as Syria and Libya.
Unveiling the 2.6 million-word report, which took seven years to complete, inquiry chairman John Chilcot said it was “an account of an intervention which went badly wrong, with consequences to this day.”
More than 100 anti-war protesters gathered outside the London conference center where the report was published, with many shouting: “Blair lied, thousands died” and: “War criminal Tony Blair.”
Although the legality of the invasion was not in his remit, retired civil servant Chilcot said the process of deciding the legal basis for war was “far from satisfactory.”
“We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort,” Chilcot said.
The war was justified on the basis that the Iraqi leader had weapons of mass destruction, although no such weapons were ever found.
The report laid the blame for this failure firmly on the intelligence community, but said the government had “overstated the firmness of the evidence.”
It confirmed long-held suspicions that Blair put Britain on a path to war as early as July 2002, when he wrote a letter to Bush saying: “I will be with you, whatever.”
Blair was also criticized for failing to challenge Bush on the lack of planning for the aftermath of the invasion and called British plans for managing the occupation post-invasion “wholly inadequate.”
The report also said Blair had “overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq.”
The inquiry dismissed Blair’s assertion that it was not possible to predict the strength of local opposition, the rise of al-Qaeda and the involvement of Iran, which fueled the violence, saying these were “explicitly identified before the invasion.”
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