Prescott Says ‘Illegal’ Iraq War Will Haunt Him

In televised comments from a news conference in central London, Blair said the 2003 invasion was the “hardest, most momentous, most agonizing decision I took as British prime minister” and accepted mistakes had been made.

In Iraq, still wracked by violence and reeling from a suicide bomb that killed at least 250 people in Baghdad this week, the findings counted for little.

Mr Starmer, first elected a year ago and not an MP when the decision was taken, said: “The Chilcot report is damning”.

The families of soldiers killed in Iraq have vowed to sue Tony Blair for “every penny”.

“The absence of the former is why I opposed the Iraq War in 2003, the absence of the latter why I voted against military action in Syria in 2015”. It said Saddam Hussein posed “no immediate threat” to Britain and UK’s joint intelligence committee believed it would take Iraq five years, after the lifting of sanctions, to produce enough fissile material for a weapon. UK’s Ambassador to the US Sir Christopher Meyer also predicted that Iraq “will probably make pacifying Afghanistan look like child’s play”, so Chilcot rejected Blair’s claim that the chaos and sectarian conflict were not predicted.

He also said intelligence reports were based on “discussions at receptions and prejudiced sources”, amounting to “tittle-tattle, not hard evidence”.

It confirmed long-held suspicions that Blair put Britain on a path to war as early as July 2002.

It dismissed Blair’s assertion that it was not possible to predict the strength of local opposition, the rise of Al-Qaeda and the involvement of Iran, which all fuelled the violence, saying these were “explicitly identified before the invasion”.

Sir John found that “despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated” and planning for Iraq after Saddam’s removal was “wholly inadequate”. It should. George Bush and Tony Blair should be hauled before a Nuremberg type global tribunal to face charges of war crimes and launching aggressive war.

Current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has apologized on behalf of the party for what he called “the disastrous decision” to go to war.

“The invasion and occupation of Iraq was a catastrophe”, Corbyn told families of British soldiers who died.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Blair insisted that although mistakes had been made, the decision to join the US-led invasion had been the right one.