Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that he accepts full responsibility for going to war in Iraq in 2003. He also said that he fells deeply and sincerely the grief and suffering of those who lost ones in Iraq.
“I express more sorrow and regret than you will ever know,” Blair told journalists.
Blair noted that intelligence assessments turned out to be wrong, aftermath turned out to be more hostile than imagined. However, he is profoundly disagree that today’s terrorism stems are consequences of the invasion in Iraq.
Blair is convinced that the world was and is in a better place without Saddam Hussein and he will not say he regrets getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
“I profoundly disagree that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to stay in power,” Tony Blair told journalists at the press conference after the Chilcot report publication.
The former prime minister added that there were no reasons to delay the invasion.
“I didn’t have the option to delay the invasion in Iraq,” he said. “I ask the British people to accept that I took the decision because I thought it was the right thing to do.”
Speaking about accusations by critics that he is a ‘poodle’ of the US, Tony Blairs said he believed it was important that America was not alone in fight against terrorism.
Earlier in the day, the UK government released an report by Sir John Chilcot devoted to the UK role in the 2003 Iraq War. Blair has been criticized for the United Kingdom’s involvement in the conflict that stretched through 2011. The campaign to topple then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on suspicion that he had weapons of mass destruction killed 179 British soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them civilians.