Chilcot report: Bush says 'world is better off' without Saddam as Blair mounts Iraq war defence – as it happened
This article is more than 8 years old
Live coverage as Sir John Chilcot unveils his report into the Iraq war. Plus all the day’s other political news as Tory leadership runners go down to three
We’re going to close our rolling coverage of the Chilcot report with a summary of the day’s key developments and reaction.
Sir John Chilcot’s 6,000-page report on the Iraq war and occupation delivered a crushing verdict on Tony Blair’s decision to join the US invasion, finding a cascade of mistakes and bad strategy that led to years of devastating mismanagement and strife.
The report revealed secret letters between Blair and George W Bush, including one in which the then prime minister pledged to the US president: “I will be with you, whatever.” Six days after invasion, he added: “This is the moment when you can define international politics for the next generation: the true post-cold war world order.”
Blair responded by saying: “I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you can ever know or believe.” But the former prime minister insisted he made the right decision. “I believe it is better we took that decision. I acknowledge the mistakes and accept responsibility for them,” he said. “As this report makes clear, there were no lies, there was no deceit.”
Bush defiantly insisted the decision to invade was the correct one. “Despite the intelligence failures and other mistakes he has acknowledged previously,” a spokesperson said, “President Bush continues to believe the whole world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.”
Blair rejected at least nine findings of the report, including that war was “not a last resort”, that the UK and US undermined the UN, that an insurgency was predictable and that the military and intelligence services share some blame.
Lord Butler and others made limited defenses of Blair, with many saying that he exagerrated the reliability of intelligence but acted in good faith and did not lie. The US diplomat in charge of the occupation in 2003 agreed with several key findings but also argued that the decision to invade was justified.
Many Iraqis met the report with the grim sense that it only articulated the obvious: that western hubris and incompetence had created the conditions for years more of strife, including Sunday’s bombing, which killed an estimated 250 people in one of the worst atrocities of postwar Iraq.
The Chilcot report is little more than a footnote to many Iraqis, who are still reeling from one of the worst atrocities of postwar Iraq: a bombing in central Baghdad that killed an estimated 250 people and outraged a country mostly inured by violence, my colleague Martin Chulov reports.
For the mix of mourners staring into the middle distance, desperate relatives wailing for help, forensic officers crouched near puddles and others who stood bewildered by the scale of destruction, it would merely tell them what they already knew: that the war and its aftermath were both grave mistakes.
The few who had seen brief reports from London on Iraqi television shrugged and pointed at the damage when asked what they made of what was effectively Britain’s mea culpa. “This is the reason for all this chaos,” said Bassam Jaber Abayati, a Karrada local. “They should have known better. They should have done this [apologised] earlier. The west should be accountable for all this misery.”
A second local, Ahmed Ali said: “This is the result of the war. It’s all destroyed. What do you want me to say? If I had money I would not live in Iraq another day. I would go anywhere that would take me.”
Throughout the eight-year occupation and chaotic years since, sectarian war and widespread displacement of communities have ravaged the country. Terror attacks have barely relented, with state-backed militias running riot, and first al-Qaida in Iraq and then Islamic State unleashing murderous savagery.
Col Ahmed Hassan, a police officer attached to the interior ministry, said: “There is no excuse for [the decision to invade]. It was an extermination war. This is not the terrorists behind this. It is states against us. This is what all Iraqis feel. There was a high level of engineering behind this and that is the job of countries.”
Fadi Faris, 35, from Amara, an area occupied by the British army, said: “It was a mistake of excuses. They found the worst two reasons to invade, weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism, and they stuck to them.
“We still live in the way of the dark ages, so we could never use the tools of democracy. It was like bringing a knife and giving it to a child. Under Saddam we had a government with a big problem. Now we don’t have a real government and we only have problems.
“The British, when they came to Iraq 100 years ago, established a good government. Iraq was stable and it was going in a reasonable direction. They learned nothing [about the society] from that time. The US was the real decision-maker. Britain was just an ally. It was not a British plan at all.”
Russia has claimed it warned the UK of the “unjust and highly dangerous” Iraq war, with its embassy in London seizing on the Chilcot report to boast about its warnings.
“No real WMD in Baghdad, unjust & highly dangerous war. The entire region on the receiving end,” embassy staff tweeted. Since Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 1999, the Kremlin has generally opposed western intervention abroad – even though in recent years Russia has grown more active in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria.
My colleague Ian Black reports on reaction around the world:
Franz Klintsevich, first deputy chairman of the defence and security committee in the upper house of Russia’s parliament, said the UK should apologise to the Iraqi people, pay compensation and prosecute the officials who decided on the invasion.
In Iran, widely seen as the greatest beneficiary of the US-led invasion, there was no official comment and the media paid scant attention to the report. The exception was Press TV, an English-language state broadcaster, which provided live coverage of Tony Blair’s press conference.
In Tehran, Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, pledged that his country would stand by the Iraqi government in a phone call to the prime minister, Haidar al-Abadi. He expressed his condolences for the recent terrorist attacks that have killed 250 people in Baghdad. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, also failed to mention Chilcot.
Iraqi media was dominated by the mounting death toll in the Karrada bombings. Another story was about Abadi accepting the resignation of his interior minister in the wake of the carnage.
“Iraq as a country has become a battlefield for regional and international powers, and this is one of the most critical consequences of the invasion,” Iraqi political analyst Hadi al-Isami told al-Jazeera, saying Chilcot would do nothing to assuage the country’s plight.
#Chilcot inquiry: No real WMD in Baghdad, unjust & highly dangerous war. The entire region on the receiving end. pic.twitter.com/UoL09xfqqQ
— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) July 6, 2016
Paul Bremer, the US diplomat put in charge of governing Iraq after the invasion and occupation, has backed several key findings of the Chilcot report.
Bremer agreed in a piece in the Guardian that the US and UK made “inadequate” plans for the occupation of Iraq, and accused both George W Bush and Tony Blair of ignoring internal warnings.
Bremer. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP
“The commission noted that that ‘bad tidings’ tended not to be heard in London,” he said. “The same was true in Washington. Before the war, a few American military officers suggested the need for a substantial post-conflict military presence. They were not heard.”
Bremer also criticized the failure to prevent looting after the invasion and inconsistent military commitments.
“As David Richmond, one of the able British CPA colleagues, told the commission, the coalition ‘never got on top of security’,” he said. “So the coalition gave the impression to Iraqis that we were not serious in this most important goal of any government. No doubt this failure encouraged some members of what became the resistance.”
But the former diplomat agreed with Bush and Blair’s insistence that they made the right decision even if their methods were severely wanting.
“I believe history will agree that it was the correct, if difficult decision to remove Saddam,” he writes. “Had we not done so, today we would likely confront a nuclear armed Iraq facing off against a nuclear armed Iran. Bad as the unrest in the region is today, that would be worse.”
Earlier on Wednesday, a spokesperson for Bush said the former president acknowledges “intelligence failures and other mistakes”, but added “the whole world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power”.
Former defence secretary Geoff Hoon has also stoically defended his and Tony Blair’s conduct in an interview to Sky News. He says he has read only the executive summary of the Chilcot report.
“We do have to learn the lessons of process,” he says. There were ways we could and should have done better.” Hoon says that Blair “accepted those cirticisms, as do I.”
Like Blair, McFadden and Clwyd, he argues that everyone made decisions in good faith.
Hoon. Photograph: Reuters
“We know now that there were not weapons of mass destruction,” Hoon says. “Knowing that now we would not have had the legal basis to have gone into Iraq.”
He insists that he saw nothing to suggest that British intelligence had received flawed intelligence – such as a description of a chemical weapon that was suspiciously akin to a device in the movie The Rock. “Had I seen something that doubted it maybe things would’ve been different,” he says, when asked why he didn’t challenge intelligence or Blair.
“I did not detect anyone at that time who did not do anything otherwise than a serious job,” he says. “I believe they were hardworking, conscientious dedicated people.”
“With the benefit of hindsight you can look back on any group of people and say they could’ve done better.”
Q: But wasn’t it your responsibility?
Hoon: “They gave me their best military advice and I certainly challenged that advice from time to time.”
But more often than not, Hoon hints, he deferred to others. “These are peple who devoted their entire lives [to the military and intellgience]. It’s not for politicians to second guess their expert advice.”
Hoon also insists that information never received the ministry about the dire need for equipment to protect against IEDs and the guerrilla warfare that came with occupation and Iraq’s sectarian wars.
There was “no sense of anyone on the ground at the time saying this piece of equipment or that piece of equipment was required”, Hoon says.
“Very little of this information actually made it to the ministry of defense, nevermind to the ministers,” he concludes. “I recognise that overall I was responsible.”
The Labour MP Pat McFadden has given a partial defence of Tony Blair and the decision to invade Iraq on BBC News, saying “these decisions were taken in good faith”.
“Intelligence was not falsified, parliament was not lied to, the cabinet was not lied to,” he says, meaning British intelligence agencies did not falsify material, although they accepted bogus information.
Pat McFadden. Photograph: Gett
“This was not unconditional support,” he adds. “All the effort on the British end was to persuade the Americans to go down the UN route.”
McFadden was an adviser to Blair in Downing Street, and defends the former prime minister. “Advisers can advise,” he says, “but a prime minister more than anyone has to make that decision. He still believes it was the right decision, but of course it had many consequences and he’s had to live with them since.”
“He could’ve opted out of not taking part, I don’t think he could’ve stopped the Americans,” he adds. “It was at that time, to use a phrase from our age, a binary decision.”
Like Ann Clwyd he argues that sectarian violence was rampant in Iraq before the invasion created a power vacuum out of which a Shia-Sunni civil war erupted. People act as though “history began in 2003”, McFadden says, and as though “now all the extremist violence stemmed from that”.
“But it’s important to stress that’s not the case. We had 9/11 two years before this, we had Bali, and we also had Saddam’s regime, which had engaged in its own horrific killing.”
“I don’t think it was a rush to war, and you know Mr Blair was asked about this today, about whether there could’ve been more time,” McFadden goes on. “The answer he gave was ‘I had to make a decision.’ That’s what a prime minister has to do.”
The French ambassador to the US, Gérard Araud, has taken the Chilcot report as a vindication of his country’s refusal to join the invasion of Iraq.
Araud tweets: “May I remind everybody how France was abused and denigrated for opposing the war? France was right!”
Alongside some statistics about the toll of the war – approximately 165,000 civilian casualties, 4,486 American soldiers killed, 179 British service members killed, more than $2tn spent and no weapons of mass destruction found – Araud posted another tweet. “Not only a geopolitical disaster, not only distortion and manipulation but also a human tragedy,” he wrote.
.@benjaminhaddad In 2003, Blair was not facing more "uncertainties and constraints" that the French President who opposed an absurd war.
British intelligence agencies accepted false information even after a source told them of a supposed chemical weapon that was remarkably similar to one from the 1996 movie The Rock, my colleague Ewen MacAskill has learned from the report.
The incident is just one of a series of blunders described by the Chilcot report committed by Britain’s overseas spy agency, the Secret Intelligence Service in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In the incident, the report describes a source providing details about spherical glass containers allegedly filled with chemical weapons at an establishment in Iraq.
MI6 at the time defended the authenticity of the source and the material, according to the Chilcot report. “However, it drew attention to the fact that the source’s description of the device and its spherical glass contents was remarkably similar to the fictional chemical weapon portrayed in the film The Rock,” the report says.
In the 1996 movie, Nicolas Cage, playing an FBI chemical warfare specialist, joins Sean Connery, playing a former British spy, to prevent chemical weapons being launched against San Francisco.
The similarity between the movie and the source’s alleged device had been noted when the MI6 report was first circulated on 11 and 23 September 2002, well before the Iraq invasion in March 2003.
But this and other bogus claims were not formally withdrawn by MI6 until 29 July 2003, four months after the invasion, Chilcot reports.
In a devastating finding, Chilcot said: “SIS did not inform No 10 or others that the source who had provided the reporting issued on 11 and 23 September 2002 about production of chemical and biological agent had been lying to SIS.”
False allegations that Saddam could attack UK targets within “45 minutes” were not withdrawn until 28 September 2004. Bogus information by a source known as Curve Ball that also fed into the case for war was not withdrawn until the following day, 29 September 2004.
The faulty intelligence from MI6 was compounded by Tony Blair who hardened up the information when he wrote the foreword to the so-called “dodgy dossier” in September 2002. Chilcot concluded that Blair presented the assessments of the spy agencies to parliament with a “certainty” not justified by available intelligence.
Chilcot blames the intelligence community not just for passing on bogus information in the first place but failing to correct the prime minister when he toughened up the so-called intelligence.
The intelligence agencies had a serious blind spot. “At no stage was the proposition that Iraq might no longer have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or programmes identified and examined by either JIC (the Joint Intelligence Committee, the umbrella organisation representing all the intelligence agencies) or the policy community.”
In the foreword to the dossier presented to the public in September 2002 preparing the case for war, Blair said he believed the intelligence had “established beyond doubt” that Saddam had continued to produce WMDs.
But the Chilcot report concludes: “The assessed intelligence had not established beyond doubt that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.”
The Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who was Tony Blair’s special envoy on human rights in Iraq before the war, has defended the former prime minister in an interview on Sky TV.
“I think Tony Blair did the right thing at the time on the evidence that he had,” she says.
When pressed to defend her support for the invasion, she cites what she saw in the 1990s and early 2000s in her argument that Saddam Hussein was going to inflict war crimes on minorities in Iraq.
“I’d just come back in February that year from Kurdistan where the Kurds are already fleeing out of the towns and the cities into the countryside, because they believed that Saddam Hussein was going to be using chemical weapons against them again.
“In all the years that I’ve known them they said there was no other way but war.”
The Sky host argues that the invasion and mistake-riddled occupation destabilised Iraq and created the circumstances ripe for civil war – the brutal Shia-Sunni wars that were not quelled until the so-called US “surge”. Al-Qaida did not have a strong presence in Iraq before the war, but Clwyd says: “Sectarian violence had been going a long time in Iraq, before 2003.”
“The elements of al-Qaida in the north of Iraq, they were closely associated subsequently with al-Qaida, those are also still in existence,” she says.
Q: So you don’t see the links between dismantling the security forces and the rise of al-Qaida in Iraq with the invasion?
Clwyd: “No, I think that’s much too simplistic.”
She again says that the atrocities perpetrated by Saddam justified the invasion. “If you’d stood by the mass graves,” she says, “near Babylon and you’d see bodies being excavated … they were Shia [and they] had tried an uprising against Saddam Hussein, and they’d been ruthlessly suppressed. The Kurds had tried to raise an uprising against Saddam Hussein and they were ruthlessly suppressed.”
She notes the UN resolutions being ignored by Saddam. “I think there is an argument for intervention,” she says.
Q: Was there no alternative to war?
“I didn’t want a war,” Clwyd says. “We gathered evidence of Iraqi war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide.” She suggests that perhaps the international community could have obtained indictments against Saddam and members of his regime. “Also sanctions. Although there were sanctions against the regime, they did not work properly. Saddam Hussein really subverted the oil for food programme.”
Clwyd, right, with Regimental Sergeant Major Terry Harman in Iraq. Photograph: Phil Hannaford/PA
Tony Blair’s lengthy speech about the Chilcot report, and his subsequent Q&A with journalists, was remarkable. Blair has expressed sorrow and regret about what happened before, but today, particularly in his opening remarks, he sounded more emotional and contrite than ever.
The intelligence statements made at the time of going to war turned out to be wrong.
The aftermath turned out more hostile, protracted and bloody than we ever imagined.
The coalition planned for one set of ground facts and encountered another.
A nation whose people we wanted to see free and secure from the evil of Saddam became instead victim of sectarian terrorism.
For all of this I express more sorrow, regret and apology and in greater measure than you can know or may believe.
But the raw emotion (genuine, I believe, although no doubt many will assume it wasn’t) could not conceal the fact that Blair’s performance was a statement of defiance.
Earlier this year Tony Blair said in an interview that at some point “the political class as a whole has got to get up and stand up for itself”. That’s what he was doing this afternoon. His main complaint about Sir John Chilcot was that Chilcot did not recognise what it was like to have to take decisions. Blair repeatedly criticised Chilcot for refusing to consider what might have happened if Britain has chosen not to support the invasion of Iraq, suggesting that there was a thick streak of naivety or otherworldliness running through the report.
But Blair also rejected many of Chilcot’s specific conclusions. I’ve counted at least nine points where Blair said Chilcot was wrong. Here they are:
Blair said he did not accept Chilcot’s claim that the war was “not a last resort”. There was no rush to war, Blair said.
The inquiry finds that as at 18 March war was not the ‘last resort’. But given the impasse at the UN and the insistence of the USA – for reasons I completely understood and with hundreds of thousands of troops in theatre which could not be kept in situ indefinitely – it was the last moment of decision for us, as the report accepts.
He rejected Chilcot’s claim that Britain and America undermined the authority of the UN by going to war without a second resolution. Blair said:
The inquiry finds that going to war without a majority of the UNSC in agreement ‘undermined the authority of the UN.’
The reality is that we – Britain – had continually tried to act with the authority of the UN. I successfully convinced the Americans to go back to the UN in November 2002 to secure resolution 1441.
Blair said he did not accept Chilcot’s assessment that it would have been acceptable to refuse to support America.
Whilst they accept that it was my prerogative as PM to decide to be with the USA in military action, the inquiry questions whether this was really necessary.
9/11 was an event like no other in US history. I considered it an attack on all the free world. I believed that Britain – as America’s strongest ally – should be with them in tackling this new and unprecedented security challenge. I believed it important that America was not alone but part of a wider coalition. In the end, a majority even of the European Union nations supported action in Iraq.
Blair said he did not accept Chilcot’s claim that the risk of an insurgency should have been predicted.
The inquiry finds that there were some warnings about sectarian fighting and bloodletting. I accept that but would point out that nowhere were these highlighted as the main risk and in any event what we faced was not the anticipated internal bloodletting but an all-out insurgency stimulated by external arms and money.
Blair said Chilcot was wrong to blame the armed forces, the intelligence services and civil servants, because they were following Blair’s instructions.
I do not think it is fair or accurate to criticise the armed forces, intelligence services, or civil service. It was my decision they were acting upon. The armed forces in particular did an extraordinary job throughout our engagement in Iraq in the incredibly difficult mission we gave them.
Some of the Chilcot criticisms are of the armed forces are set out here.
Blair said he did not accept Chilcot’s claim that the war was a failure. (See 12.09pm.) Blair said the first part of the campaign was a “brilliant military success”.
He said he did not accept Chilcot’s claim that it was “humiliating” for British soldiers to have to do a deal with a militia group in southern Iraq.
Blair rejected Chilcot’s claim that it was a mistake to be conducting “two enduring campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan” at the same time.
Blair accused Chilcot of underestimating the damage done to French and German relations with America by their stance on Iraq.
George Bush says world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power
George W Bush, the former American president, has defended the decision to invade Iraq following the publication of today’s report. A spokesman for Bush said:
President Bush is hosting wounded warriors at his ranch today and has not had the chance to read the Chilcot report. Despite the intelligence failures and other mistakes he has acknowledged previously, President Bush continues to believe the whole world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. He is deeply grateful for the service and sacrifice of American and coalition forces in the war on terror. And there was no stronger ally than the United Kingdom under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair. President Bush believes we must now find the unity and resolve to stay on the offensive and defeat radical extremism wherever it exists.
Corbyn apologises for war on behalf of Labour to Iraqis, to soldiers' families and to Britons
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, is giving a speech in Westminster about the Chilcot report now. Much of the speech was the same as the one he gave in the House of Commons, but towards the end he has just included an apology on behalf of Labour for the decision to go to war.
So I now apologise sincerely on behalf of my party for the disastrous decision to go to war in Iraq in March 2003.
That apology is owed first of all to the people of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and the country is still living with the devastating consequences of the war and the forces it unleashed.
They have paid the greatest price for the most serious foreign policy calamity of the last 60 years.
The apology is also owed to the families of those soldiers who died in Iraq or who have returned home injured or incapacitated.
They did their duty but it was in a conflict they should never have been sent to.
Finally, it is an apology to the millions of British citizens who feel our democracy was traduced and undermined by the way in which the decision to go to war was taken on the basic of secret ‘I will be with you, whatever’ understandings given to the US president that have now been publicly exposed.
Corbyn makes a speech at Church House in Westminster, following the publication of the Chilcot inquiry. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
Lord Butler says Blair exaggerated the reliability of the intelligence, but did not lie
In a debate in the House of Lords in 2007 Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who chaired a report into the use of intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war, said that Tony Blair was “disingenuous” about the WMD intelligence because it did not show conclusively that Saddam Hussein had WMD, as Blair suggested. Butler also told peers that when Blair said the WMD intelligence was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”, those words “could simply not have been justified”. Peter Oborne quotes Butler repeatedly in his book Not the Chilcot Report to help make his case that Blair can be accused of lying.
But Butler has been giving interviews to Sky and BBC News this afternoon and he did not go as far as he did in the Lords. He said that, although Blair was guilty of “exaggerating the reliability of the intelligence”, he would not accuse him of lying. He also said he did not think Blair should be taken to court. That would only be justified if Blair was criminally negligent, Butler said. But he said he did not believe Blair was criminally negligent.
Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time of the Iraq war, is being interview on Sky News. He says Tony Blair was “never gung-ho” about war.
Asked about the phrase “I will be with you, whatever” that Tony Blair included in his July 2002 memo to Bush, Straw says he thought that was unwise because it would be misinterpreted.
Goldsmith says Chilcot backs his finding that war was legal
Lord Goldsmith, attorney general at the time of the Iraq war, has put out a statement about the Chilcot report.
He says he welcomes the fact that there is nothing in the report that challenges his conclusion that the war was legal, and nothing in the report which challenges the fact that this was his “honestly held view”.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion