Chilcot Report

[OneFootInTheGrave]

No threads yet?

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36712735

Tony Blair overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, sent ill-prepared troops into battle and had "wholly inadequate" plans for the aftermath, the UK's Iraq War inquiry has said.

Chairman Sir John Chilcot said the 2003 invasion was not the "last resort" action presented to MPs and the public.

There was no "imminent threat" from Saddam - and the intelligence case was "not justified", he said.

Mr Blair apologised for any mistakes made but not the decision to go to war.
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Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn - who voted against military action - 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 international opinion".

A spokesman for some of the families of the 179 British service personnel and civilians killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 said their loved ones had died "unnecessarily and without just cause and purpose".

He said all options were being considered, including asking those responsible for the failures identified in the report to "answer for their actions in the courts if such process is found to be viable".

This report does not look like it is a whitewash, a lot of information, worth the wait.

[Dauphin]

Is there anything new or meaningful? From what I've heard (albeit I am not in the UK at the moment), it's a "....and in other news, the Pope is Catholic and bears **** in the woods".

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Hutton enquiry was a whitewash, I was expecting more of the same, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Some "new" bits.

The Chilcot report points out that their committee was not a court, they were not a jury. They were not set up to make any legal findings.

But they go just about as far as they possibly could with that limitation saying: "We have, however, concluded that the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory."

What the report also reveals explicitly, is that the final decision on legality was taken by Tony Blair, not the Cabinet or the government's legal officers.

&

Tony Blair to George Bush, 11 October 2001

"There is a real willingness in the Middle East to get Saddam out but a total opposition to mixing this up with the current operation [bombing Afghanistan]... I have no doubt that we need to deal with Saddam. But if we hit Iraq now, we would lose the Arab world, Russia, probably half the EU and my fear is the impact of all of that on Pakistan. However, I am sure we can devise a strategy for Saddam deliverable at a later date."

[Dauphin]

I guess my point is that, for example, we have "known" for a long time that Saddam was in the cross-hairs not long after the first tower even fell. Having it codified by the inquiry can give solace to certain people, but will it make even an iota of difference in bringing Blair to account?

[OneFootInTheGrave]

I see it as a positive start

Blair's Iraq war legacy leaves him damned for all time
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A few hours after Sir John Chilcot had published the 12-volume, 2.6m word report of his seven-year inquiry, the players of the National Theatre took to the stage for a one-off revival of Stuff Happens, the David Hare drama about the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was a fitting gesture, for the entire day had been a kind of performance, a battlefield re-enactment – not of the Iraq war itself, with all its bloodshed and pain, but of the conflict that raged through Britain’s national life nearly a decade and a half ago.

The pageant included all the familiar players, all the old vocabulary. Once again, news anchors were talking fluently of “UN resolution 1441” – the article 50 of its day – or “the Crawford summit,” when Tony Blair and George W Bush met at the US president’s Texas ranch. We were back to dossiers and WMD. Ming Campbell was on, referring to Hans Blix. Alastair Campbell was talking about dossiers and sexing-up. And, as passionate and full of righteous fury as ever, there was a hoarse Blair, taking every question at a press conference that lasted a full two hours, making the same case he made repeatedly back then and ever since: “I did it because I thought it was right.”

Completing the scene, just as they always did, were the anti-war demonstrators gathered in Westminster in their bloodied Blair masks, megaphoning their denunciations of the former prime minister as a liar and war criminal. Close your eyes and it was 2003.

The protesters had come fully prepared to dismiss Chilcot as a whitewash and establishment stitch-up. But that was one banner they could have left at home. The 77-year-old retired Whitehall mandarin delivered a report that was scalding in its criticism of the war and Blair’s role in every aspect of it. He slammed the way the former PM sold it, justified it and planned for its aftermath – announcing that he had failed, or worse, on all counts.
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Steadily, the quiet civil servant shredded the arguments the former prime minister had used as protective shields for nearly 15 years. By the time he came to deliver his response, Blair had next to no place to hide. He could only seek comfort in his view that Chilcot had laid to rest the accusations of deception against him. As he has done so often, Blair said that you could argue with his judgment but not his good faith. “Please stop saying I was lying,” he said.

The trouble is, Chilcot unveiled the memo in which Blair told Bush “I will be with you, whatever”: hard to square that with Blair’s insistence that he had not decided to go to war long before the official decision, come what may. The documents showed Blair committing to a “clever strategy” for regime change in Iraq, even though Blair always insisted he was pursuing no such goal. And he faulted Blair for presenting claims about the threat supposedly posed by Saddam “with a certainty that was not justified”. Remember, Blair introduced the September 2002 dossier saying he believed it established the existence of Iraqi WMD “beyond doubt”. Yet Blair knew the intelligence was shot through with doubt.

Perhaps the best description is the one that formed the Economist cover line in July 2004: that Bush and Blair were “sincere deceivers”. The prime minister believed what he said, but said more than he could know. The effect was to mislead public and parliament.

Some will say that none of this is really new, that Chilcot simply repeated everything the critics had said about this war from the beginning. But that means a lot. This was the voice of the establishment, not a placard at a demo or a trenchant Guardian column. The Chilcot report is the official judgement on the 2003 invasion. For those who stood against the war, including the families of those who lost their lives, that represents belated vindication. For Blair it means a verdict that damns him for the ages.

[BeBMan]

BBC's "The Papers" of today has a short bit of "The Sun" headlined "Weapon of Mass Deception" related to a Blair pic.

How ironic.

[kentonio]

Someone posted the Sun headline from back then where they tore into Charles Kennedy calling him spineless and venomous. They really are a despicable propaganda outlet, nothing more than a working class version of the Daily Mail.

[Berzerker]

didn't some memo (downing st 10?) say the intelligence was being fixed around invading?