Man lights candles near scene of car bomb attack in the centre of Baghdad, June, 2016. Hadi Mizban / Press Association. All rights reserved.Seven years ago, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown commissioned Sir John Chilcot to lead an investigation into the events that led Britain to join the US in initiating the 2003 war in Iraq.
Launching the inquiry, Gordon Brown said: ‘The inquiry will, I stress, be fully independent of Government. Its scope is unprecedented. It covers an eight-year period, including the run-up to the conflict and the full period of conflict and reconstruction. The committee of inquiry will have access to the fullest range of information, including secret information. In other words, its investigation can range across all papers, all documents and all material.’ All this was a response to a disastrous war launched in March 2003 by the US administration, and supported by the British government, under Tony Blair’s premiership.
Tony Blair presented the dodgy dossier to the British Parliament on 24 September 2002. He claimed that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, the so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and active military plans for the use of such weapons, which could be activated to reach British targets within 45 minutes. We now know that the infamous claim that Saddam could launch WMD within 45 minutes was ‘sexed up’, by Alastair Campbell, to push Britain into the war.
