The man who took Britain to war in Iraq admits the invasion helped the rise of ISIS, but refuses to apologise for the lies used to build the case for war. Andrea Germanos from Common Dreams reports.
FORMER BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted that the invasion of Iraq helped the rise of ISIS.
Speaking to CNN's Fareed Zakaria in an interview that aired on Sunday, Blair said:
"Of course you can't say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation [in Iraq] in 2015."
"There are elements of truth" in the fact that the invasion is responsible for the rise in ISIS, he said.
Asked whether the invasion was wrong, Blair failed to give a direct apology, saying that he could
"... apologise for some of the mistakes in planning and certainly our mistakes in our understanding of what would happen when you remove the regime. But I find it hard to apologise for removing Saddam. I think, even from today in 2015, it is better that he's not there than that he is there."
Tony Blair-ly apologizes for #Iraq but #MSM hails it as history in the making #FAIL https://t.co/SujwzIplap
— IN THE NOW (@INTHENOWRT) October 26, 2015
Blair continued:
"I can say that I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because, even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought."
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon responded by tweeting that Blair's comments were part of a 'spin operation' ahead of the release of the long-awaited Chilcot Inquiry, which looks at the UK's role in the Iraq war. And the Stop the War Coalition took to twitter to offer this response:
In a related development, a memo publicised last week by the Daily Mail revealed that, in contrast to claims made by Blair, a year before the U.S.-led invasion, he told the administration of President George W. Bush that he would support military action in that country.
'On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary', former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote to Bush in the memo written in March 2002.
The Blair spin operation begins but the country still awaits the truth. The delay to Chilcot report is a scandal. https://t.co/pPhRcZzGrc
— Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) October 24, 2015
This story was originally published in Common Dreams on 25/10/15 and has been republished under a Creative Commons licence.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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#auspol on the weekend #TonyBlair apologised for war in Iraq now GeorgeW BUsh & little Johnny Howard Time For TRuth pic.twitter.com/TMgt9VCSk4
— Michael Ryan (@mryansisland) October 26, 2015
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