Iraq invaded before peace options exhausted: United Kingdom inquiry

Instead, Mr Blair said, Iraq had a government “accepted as legitimate, the product of an election”.

Peter Leahy, who was chief of the Australian Army from 2002 to 2008, said Australia had to examine how it decides to go to war in light of the report.

The Iraq Inquiry, also referred to as the Chilcot Inquiry after its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, is a British public inquiry into the nation’s role in the Iraq War. “I believe I made the right decision and the world is better and safer as a result of it”.

Newspaper front pages were scathing, with The Times describing it as “Blair’s private war” and the Daily Mail calling the former prime minister: “A monster of delusion”.

“It’s not about attacking Tony Blair personally”, the shadow health secretary said.

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. They say “no we want you to apologise for the decision”…

“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”.

Asked whether he should offer an apology to military families, Howard said: “Obviously I am sorry for the wounds or injuries that anybody suffered”. He argued that he had acted in good faith, based on intelligence at the time which said that Iraq’s president had weapons of mass destruction.

O’Connor said terrorists killed my brother, but “in that sentence of terrorists, I include Mr Blair”.

The Chilcot probe found that the invasion of Iraq claiming the existence of mass-destruction weapons was carried out based on faulty intelligence and before having exhausted all peaceful options.

And if he had been in power during the Arab Spring in 2011, “I believe he would have tried to keep power” in the way that Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, had done.

In his almost two hour-long response on Wednesday, he defended the decision to depose a “brutal dictator” and held up the report as proof against claims that his government had lied and manipulated evidence to support a predesigned quest for war, according to The Guardian.

Arguments have been ongoing since 2003 over whether or not the invasion was legal and whether or not parliament was misled ahead of taking the vote on whether or not to take military action.

Rona Mackay, recently elected MSP for Strathkelvin and Bearsden, said: “The invasion of Iraq should never have taken place, and the shocking findings of the inquiry today prove that”.