“I will be with you whatever,” a prominent Englishman once wrote. The statement in question was not written in the 1600s by William Shakespeare, but in 2002 by former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair in a letter to then U.S. President George W. Bush.
In the Chilcot Report, released Wednesday, memos from Blair reveal his changing positions — from first supporting a strategy of containment to Blair’s approval of military action and invasion. The report was conducted by Sir John Chilcot after former PM Gordon Brown requested an official inquiry into the lead up to the invasion.
The report shows that shortly after 9/11, Blair reached out to Bush and urged him not take hasty action in Iraq.
“[Blair] sought to prevent precipitate military action by the U.S. which he considered would undermine the success of the coalition which had been established for action against international terrorism,” the report’s executive summary says.
ISIS Claims Responsibility For Bombing That Has Killed At Least 200 In BaghdadAt least 200 people have been killed by a car bomb detonated in one of Baghdad’s busiest areas Sunday. The Islamic…thinkprogress.orgBy a 2002 meeting at Bush’s Crawford Ranch in Texas, however, Blair’s view appears to have changed. “When the U.S. Administration turned its attention to regime change in Iraq as part of the second phase of the ‘Global War on Terror’, Mr. Blair’s immediate response was to seek to offer a partnership and to work with it to build international support for the position that Iraq was a threat which had to be dealt with,” the report reads.
While the report says Blair was influenced by trying to maintain a strong relationship with the United States, it nonetheless lays much of the blame at the feet of the former leader of the UK’s Labour party.
“Chilcot does not pass judgment on whether the war was legal. But it says the way the legal basis was dealt with before the 20 March invasion was far from satisfactory,” the Guardian reported. “Chilcot’s report is more damning than expected and amounts to arguably the most scathing official verdict given on any modern British prime minister.”
Blair addressed the report’s findings with a half apology. “The intelligence assessment turned out to be wrong, the aftermath turned out to be more hostile,” he said. “A nation whose people we wanted to set free instead became the victim of sectarian terrorism. For all of this I express sorrow and regret.”
Still, he maintained that he had done the “right thing” by choosing to invade Iraq. “If I was back in the same place, with the same information I would take the same decision because obviously that was the decision I believe was right,” he said. Neither Blair’s words of regret nor his accusation that poor intelligence is to blame are new.
“I find it hard to apologize for removing Saddam,” Blair told Fareed Zakaria last year. “I think, even from today in 2015, it is better that he’s not there than that he is there.”
George W. Bush meanwhile, hasn’t offered any sort of apology. According to some reports, nearly half a million people died as a result of the Iraq war from 2003 to 2011.
On Sunday, Baghdad faced the worst attack since the 2003 invasion in which at least 200 people were killed.