Chilcot probe notwithstanding, Australia defends supporting Iraq War
The threat in reality, Chilcot said, was not imminent at all – and Blair also reportedly ignored warnings that Iraq would be thrown into civil war after the invasion happened.
– Blair overestimated his ability to influence USA decision-making on Iraq and promised to support then-US president George W. Bush’s bid to remove Hussein in private letters, before the United Nations had completed its inspections for weapons.
DELUDED war criminal Tony Blair continued yesterday with his non-mea culpa over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite the Chilcot Inquiry’s damning findings.
“Look, I regret, clearly, everybody regrets the loss of life in any military conflict and I’ve said before and I repeat it, the hardest decision that I took as Prime Minister, along with my Cabinet colleagues, was commit the men and women of the Australian Defence force to military conflict”.
“For Tony Blair to say the struggle was not in vain suggests he hasn’t closely examined the chaos that was unleashed by the original ill-fated decision by himself and George Bush for going to Iraq”.
Bush, the main promoter of the Iraq war during 2003-2011, has said that he still hasn’t read the Chilcot report which raised harsh criticisms against his former ally Tony Blair in Britain and that he was convinced that the world is a better place without Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Well, I defend that decision.
Blair conceded that prewar intelligence turned out to be wrong, and the conflict’s aftermath was “more hostile, protracted and bloody than ever we imagined”.
When asked if it was the case that the former Prime Minister simply wanted to believe in the intelligence on WMDs, Blair said: “It wasn’t that I wanted to believe it – I did believe it”.
However, the former Prime Minister insisted he would still approve military action, given the intelligence information he was shown in the run up to the war.
“Do I apologise for the decision that I took?”
Blair admitted there were “mistakes in planning and process” in Britain’s role in the invasion but said: “I would take the same decision [again]”.
He said the report proved the Iraq War had been an “act of military aggression launched on a false pretext”, something he said which has “long been regarded as illegal by the overwhelming weight of worldwide opinion”.
Judgments about the danger of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction “were presented with a certainty that was not justified” by the underlying intelligence, Chilcot said.
“The New Zealand Government’s got a pretty clear track record – we’ve been in office for about eight years now, I think we have given a lot of weight to New Zealand’s independent foreign policy and we’ve obviously garnered the respect of other countries who were good enough to elect us to the Security Council”.
