‘It is imperative we learn lessons from Chilcot Report’

He added: “Now is the time to achieve justice and we support an global trial at the Hague to try Tony Blair and others for their part in these war crimes”.

From the outset, the report makes clear that the war was not one of last resort, that Iraq posed no imminent threat to the United Kingdom, that the intelligence assessments the government drew on were ill-founded, and that more peaceful options should have been exhausted before military ones were entertained.

In a sense the long awaited Chilcot Report into the Iraq war has told us little that we did not already know.

√ Problems after the invasion, including internal fighting, Iranian influences, regional instability and al Qaeda activity, were flagged as risks before the invasion.

More than 100 anti-war protesters gathered outside the conference centre where the report was published, with many shouting: “Blair lied, thousands died” and “war criminal Tony Blair”.

Relatives of some of the 179 British soldiers who died in Iraq said they would scrutinise the findings for possible grounds for legal action against Blair and other officials. Chilcot described Saddam as “undoubtedly a brutal dictator” who had repressed and murdered many of his own people and attacked his neighbours.

He told BBC Daily Politics: “I think that the important issue here is that it is not just one individual, Parliament’s on trial”.

“Do I apologise for the decision that I took?”

And he was adamant Tony Blair didn’t need to involve British servicemen and women to help remove Saddam Hussein back in 2003.

“The report. will not change anything – all this is empty talk”, said Zainab Hassan, aged 60. But Chilcot concludes “It is unclear what specific grounds Mr Blair relied upon in reaching his view”.

The decision to join the 2003 invasion has hung over Britain ever since.

As a result of the experience in Iraq, worldwide powers were approaching the issue of reconstructing Syria after its current civil war with “an appropriate degree of humility”, he said.

“All options are open, ” said Matthew Jury, a lawyer for some of the families.

He said there are obvious lessons to be learned from the Chilcot report, but the Government hasn’t taken them on board.

The inquiry was set up in 2009 by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was under pressure for a public accounting of the conflict.

The war was justified on the basis that the Iraq leader had weapons of mass destruction, although no such weapons were never found.

Mr Howard said it should be borne in mind that Saddam Hussein had a long-term goal to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction program, once the threat of sanctions disappeared.

√ War preparations “failed to take into account the magnitude of the task of stabilising, administering and reconstructing Iraq”.

Mr 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”.

Mr Howard said he was happy to be accountable for what occurred.

However, Sir Chilcot says the chaos in Iraq which followed the invasion should have been foreseen.

The report also provides a sobering assessment of the power imbalance in the trans-Atlantic “special relationship”.

Chilcot said Britain did not have the capacity to engage in campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and said it was humiliating that the military in 2007 had had to make a deal with a militia that had become dominant in the southern Iraqi city of Basra which Britain was supposed to control.

“When he (Blair) gave his evidence, it was definitely the Tony Blair show”.

‘In the years that have gone by there’s been this constant claim that we went to war based on a lie, ‘ Mr Howard said in Sydney on Thursday.

Blair’s Christian faith was key to his foreign policy, particularly underpinning his advocacy of military intervention in Iraq and, previously and more successfully, in Sierra Leone and Kosovo.

He also said it would be “far better” if he had challenged intelligence on Iraq’s weapons in the run-up to war.