Chilcot: ‘Damning’ critique of Blair Iraq policy
July 6, 2016, 12:44 pm

The report is sure to galvanize calls for Blair to be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court [Xinhua]

The report, which comes seven years after parliamentary pressure pushed then-prime Minister Gordon Brown to commission Chilcot to pursue the matter, acknowledges that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator but that the UK joined the US war machine before exhausting peaceful efforts to end any conflict.

At almost every turn of the page, the report is a devastating critique, the Guardian says, of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Iraq policy.

As expected by many experts, Chilcot accuses Blair of basing the rationale to go to war on flawed evidence which was not challenged.

The report says that Iraq posed no imminent threat to the UK and that containment policies instituted by both the UK and US were working.

Most damaging, perhaps, is the report’s finding that the UK undermined international efforts from the UN to resolve the conflict and efficiently persuade Iraq to conform to Security Council resolutions.

The UK is one of the five founding members the United Nations and a permanent member of the Security Council. Chilcot says that the other permanent members, except for the US, supported continued UN inspections of Iraq’s war facilities and negotiations with Baghdad.

The report, which took seven years to finish, included testimony from 129 witnesses and cost more than $11 million dollars. The Chilcot inquiry comprised five committee members, including Sir John.

“We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted,” Chilcot told the press on Wednesday.

“Military action at that time was not a last resort,” he added.

He also said that despite severe warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated.

The report comes with chilling timeliness as Iraqis mourn more than 250 people killed in a massive truck bombing claimed by the Islamic State in Baghdad earlier this week.

It is also likely to cause controversy among the families of the UK’s war dead – 179 died in Iraq following the invasion of 2003. Many of these families have called for investigations from taking the country to war based on faulty intelligence data to leaving soldiers under-equipped in battle.

But it is common Iraqis who have paid the heaviest price. The death toll from the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 to the present has varied according to different sources.

Iraq Body Count, which relies on reports of fatalities in global press, says that 174,000 people were killed between 2003 and 2013. About 123,000 were civilians.

The UK-based Lancet medical journal in 2006 put the death toll as high as 650,000.

Exact figures are not known but most analysts estimate the death toll lies between half a million and 1.3 million dead as a result of violence and collapse of infrastructure since 2003.

On Wednesday, Blair said the Chilcot report proves that he did not lie about the Iraq war and that he was acting in the best interests of the UK.

He said he would take “full responsibility for any mistakes” in his Iraq policy, but maintained removing Saddam Hussein from power was justified at the time.

The BRICS Post with inputs from Agencies