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Chilcot report live: Blair sent troops to Iraq before peaceful options had been exhausted
Chilcot report live: Blair sent troops to Iraq before peaceful options had been exhausted
(35 minutes later)
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Chilcot is now talking about Tony Blair’s meeting with George Bush in 2002.
Heather Stewart
Blair urged Bush to take the issue of Iraq to the UN.
Here is a snippet of our main political story about the report:
Resolution 1441 was adopted by the UN security council.
Tony Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003, the Chilcot inquiry has found.
It provided for any breaches by Iraq to be reported to the security council.
In his forensic account of the way Blair and his ministers built the case for military action, Chilcot finds the then Labour prime minister – who had promised US president George W Bush, “I will be with you, whatever”– disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgements of the intelligence services.
But in December 2002 Bush decided UN weapons inspectors would not achieve the desired result.
In particular, Chilcot identifies two separate, key occasions in the buildup to the conflict, against the background of mass protests on the streets of London by the Stop the War coalition, when Blair appears to have overplayed the threat from Iraq and underplayed the risks of invasion.
In January Blair accepted the US timetable for war in mid-March, Chilcot says.
In the House of Commons on 24 September 2002, Mr Blair presented Iraq’s past, current and future capabilities as evidence of the severity of the potential threat from Iraq’s WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. He said that, at some point in the future, that threat would become a reality,” Chilcot says.
He says Bush agreed to push for a second UN resolution.
But Chilcot argues instead: “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities in that statement, and in the dossier published the same day, were presented with a certainty that was not justified.”
But by 12 March it was clear there was no support for this, he says.
Read the full story here:
11.12am BST
Related: Tony Blair deliberately exaggerated threat from Iraq, Chilcot inquiry finds
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Chilcot says war was 'not a last resort'
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Chilcot starts by saying we should recall those killed and injured in Iraq, including the 250 people killed in the attack at the weekend.
Luke Harding
The report will be published on the committee’s website when he finishes speaking.
Here’s part of our main story on the report’s findings.
He says the invasion was the first time Britain had taken part in the invasion and occupation of a sovereign state since the second world war.
Sir John Chilcot has delivered a devastating critique of Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, with his long-awaited report concluding that Britain chose to join the US invasion before “peaceful options for disarmament” had been exhausted.
He says the inquiry has concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion before the peaceful options were exhausted.
The head of the Iraq war inquiry said the UK’s decision to attack and occupy a sovereign state for the first time since the second world war was a decision of “utmost gravity”. He described Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, as “undoubtedly a brutal dictator” who had repressed his own people and attacked his neighbours.
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But Chilcot – whom Gordon Brown asked seven years ago to head an inquiry into the conflict - was withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. Chilcot said: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
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The report suggests that Blair’s self-belief was a major factor in the decision to go to war. In a section headed Lessons, Chilcot writes: “When the potential for military action arises, the government should not commit to a firm political objective before it is clear it can be achieved. Regular reassessment is essential.”
Sir John Chilcot's statement
Read the rest here:
Sir John Chilcot is making a statement now about the findings of his report.
Related: Chilcot delivers crushing verdict on Blair and the Iraq war
He welcomes people to the QE2 centre, where the public hearings were also held.
11.37am BST
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And here is the full text of Sir John Chilcot’s statement (pdf).
Here is a picture from inside the QE2 centre.
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#ChilcotReport pic.twitter.com/Lh3CMAotbv
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The report is online on the Iraq inquiry’s website here.
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Ian Black
11:35
Publication of the Chilcot report is getting heavy coverage from Arab and other Middle Eastern media. Al-Jazeera, broadcasting in Arabic and English from the Qtarai capital, Doha, is planning to devote much of the day to live reports from London. Its Saudi-owned rival, al-Arabiya, based in Dubai, is running a story headlined “Blair in spotlight as UK Iraq inquiry gives verdict” on its English-language website, but it is far less prominent on the Arabic site.
Chilcot thanks the inquiry staff.
Al-Jazeera English, which covers Iraq in depth, says its reporting will not focus narrowly on Tony Blair and any repercussions for British domestic politics but on the broader perspective on the 2003 invasion and its continuing regional and global impact, underlined by last weekend’s carnage in Baghdad. The Chilcot story is not one of the main headlines on AJ Arabic.
And he pays tribute to Sir Martin Gilbert, one of the five members of the inquiry panel who died before the report was published.
Other big Middle Eastern stories today are the announcement of a three-day ceasefire by the Syrian government marking the start of the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of Ramadan.
And that’s it.
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Chilcot says all aspects of any military intervention need to be debated and considered with full rigour. That did not happen in this case, he says.
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Blair “overestimated his ability” to influence US decisions on Iraq, Chilcot says
Chilcot says there are many lessons in the report.
Chilcot says the UK should be able to disagree with the US.
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Chilcot says there was no need to go to war in March 2003
Chilcot says the inquiry’s report is unanimous.
Military action may have been necessary at some point. But it was not necessary in March 2003.
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Chilcot says it was “humiliating” that the UK had to do a deal with insurgent groups in Basra.
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Chilcot says from 2006 the UK was conducting two enduring campaigns, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it did not have the resources to do so.
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Chilcot says the UK was fully implemented in the coalition’s provisional authority’s decisions. But it did not have much influence over them.
He says the scale of the UK effort in post-conflict Iraq “never matched the scale of the challenge”.
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Chilcot is now talking about the government’s failure to achieve the objectives it set in Iraq.
The armed forces fought a successful campaign. Saddam Hussein fell in less than a month. He says the armed forces deserve great respect.
The invasion and subsequent instablity resulted in the death of at least 150,000 Iraqis, and probably many more. Most of them were civilians. The people of Iraq have suffered greatly.
Chilcot says the coalition made a declaration before the invasion promising a better future for the people of Iraq.
He says the inquiry considered the post-conflict period in great detail.
He only has time to address a few key points now.
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Here are some more pictures from the Stop the War Coalition protest outside the QE2 centre in central London.
Chilcot says the inquiry does not accept Blair’s claim that it was impossible to predict post-invasion problems
Chilcot is now talking about the planning for after the war. He says the risks to British troops were not properly identified, or flagged up to ministers. Cabinet did not discuss the military options or their implications, he says.
He says the government thought the post-conflict administration would be UN-led. But the US did not agree, and so instead the UK decided to get the US to accept UN authorisation of a coalition-led administration.
Blair told the inquiry the problems encountered after the invasion could not have been known in advance.
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The Green MP Caroline Lucas is one of those who has been allowed to start reading the report before it gets published at 11am.
Chilcot says it is now clear that policy on Iraq was made “on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments”.
Can't report what's i see in #Chilcot for a few hours. Will be reacting later. pic.twitter.com/1SFgGT96Ut
They were not challenged – and they should have been.
2.6 million words - speed reading starts now #Chilcot pic.twitter.com/ZwIn5280Wf
He says Blair and Jack Straw said Iraq had vast stocks of WMD. Blair said after the war Saddam Hussein retained the intent to use WMD. But this was not the argument he made before the war.
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Here is Tony Blair leaving his home this morning.
At some point protesters were outside his home with this banner.
And here is one of the protesters, Michael Culver.
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Esther Addley
Chilcot says Blair said the threat of terrorist groups getting hold of WMD was real. But Blair had been warned that an invasion would increase the threat from al-Qaida, and that it would increase the chances of terrorists getting weapons.
Outside the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre a woman with a loudhailer is reading a list of Labour MPs who voted for the war in the Iraq, to boos after each name.
Chilcot:
She says: “You will not be surprised to know that some of these Labour MPs are considering running in the leadership election ... We would like to start by saying that Jeremy Corbyn voted against the Iraq war.”
Mr Blair had been warned, however, the military action would increase the threat from al-Qaida to the UK and UK interests. He had also been warned that an invasion might lead to Iraq’s weapons and capabilities being transferred into the hands of terrorists.
Protestors with banners beginnings to arrive outside QEII centre ahead of #Chilcot report pic.twitter.com/k3kZloJJ3c
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Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general at the time of the Iraq war, was doorstepped outside his home by reporters this morning. He drafted the legal opinion saying going to war would be legal. Initially he said he would read the report first and then make a statement. But, when asked if the war was legal, he replied: “Yes, of course it was.”
10.09am BST
10:09
Esther Addley
Protesters and activists have begun arriving outside the Queen Elizabeth II centre in Westminster, where the Chilcot report will be published at 11am.
Many are carrying banners and flags, reading, “Blair: Now is the time to pay for your crimes”, and “2 million Iraqi people died in the Iraq war”. Others expressed support for the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, or called for Blair’s impeachment.
Amid shouts of, “Tony Blair, war criminal”, a large white banner was unveiled reading: “Blair must face war crimes tribunal.”
Among the protesters is a small number from the group Veterans for Peace. One of them, Ben Griffin, said: “Many of our members served in Iraq and witnessed what happened there, and we firmly believe that what happened in Iraq was a war of aggression ... during which the Geneva convention was broken many times.”
Griffin said he had served in Basra with the SAS but during a period in the UK on leave in 2005 had refused to return to Iraq.
Some banners outside #Chilcot backing Corbyn. 'Give Peace a chance: Corbyn for PM', 'With Jeremy & John against war' pic.twitter.com/Yo6Qi0ms6A
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Peter Walker
Help us read the Chilcot report
This is Peter Walker here, I’m helming the live blog with Andrew today. While we have some of the Guardian’s top people inside the lock-in to get through as much of the Chilcot report (or at least its summary) as possible in three hours, the full publication is about 2.6m words long, or almost four-and-a-half times as long as War and Peace. It will take days to read properly. And so we’re hoping you could help.
If you’re reading through the report and you spot an interesting fact or snippet you think we’ve missed, it would be great if you could let us know – we’ve set up a page for contributions.
What sort of things might be interesting? You can probably guess, but there’s also a few pointers in our article from this morning about six questions Chilcot must answer. Any assistance we can get to understand the report and its implications as fast as possible will be hugely valuable.
The full report and supporting documents will be available here from about 11.35am UK time today, though I’m guessing the website might be pretty slow to start with, given the heavy traffic.
Related: We need your help reporting on Chilcot
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Britain lost 179 servicemen and women in Iraq. They are all named on the Operation Telic wikipedia page.
Many, many more Iraqis died, but the exact number is unknown, not least because the Americans chose not to publish a count. On the BBC this morning I’ve heard different reporters describe the Iraqi death toll as either in the “tens of thousands” or the “hundreds of thousands”.
One organisation that compiles figures on this is Iraq Body Count. According to its latest figures, the number of civilians killed by violence since the invasion is between 160,400 and 179,312. But these are likely to be minimum figures because Iraq Body Count only records fatalities verified by two independent sources.
Other studies have produced much higher figures. In 2006, the Lancet medical journal published research suggesting that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the conflict. This figure was obtained by sample research – doctors doing house-to-house surveys in Iraq, asking people about the deaths of relatives – with a nationwide figure then being produced by extrapolation. In 2015, the US-based Physicians for Social Responsibility published a report using similar methodology that claimed that 1m Iraqis had been killed since the invasion, or 5% of the population.
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The Stop the War Coalition is organising a protest outside the QE2 centre to coincide with the publication of the Chilcot report.
10am Today | Outside QE2 Centre | Protest: #Chilcot - Time for Truth & Justice - https://t.co/1AbyNUijlI pic.twitter.com/uP9Y2vBOqx
Lindsey German, the coalition’s convenor, says that regardless of what Chilcot says, she believes Tony Blair lied.
Whatever #Chilcot will say Blair lied, thousands died. Join protest from 10 onwards Westminster @STWuk
She has also retweeted a link to this article by the journalist Peter Oborne, based on his new book Not the Chilcot Report, which makes the case that Blair can be accused of lying to justify the war and of initiating a war of aggression (ie, a war crime.)
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Jack Straw, who was UK foreign secretary at the time of the Iraq war, and who by his own account could have stopped Britain’s participation in the war if he had chosen to oppose it, was asked about the report as he left his home this morning. Asked if he stood by his decision to support the war, he replied:
I’m just on the way to read the report. I’ve not yet seen it. So you’ll have to forgive me. I shall be making lots of comments once I’ve read the report, but obviously not in advance.
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The parents of Senior Aircraftsman Peter McFerran, 24, from North Wales, who was killed in southern Iraq in 2007, arrived at the QE2 centre in London shortly before the report was released to families at 8am, the Press Association reports. The couple had travelled to London from Flintshire and wore “Justice for Peter” T-shirts.
McFerran’s mother Ann, 64, said she was “apprehensive” and didn’t know what to expect. She said it was her husband Bob’s 73rd birthday and added: “The right outcome would be a good birthday present.” Asked what that outcome would be, she replied: “Justice for Peter.”
