THE long-awaited Chilcot Report into the war in Iraq is set to savage Tony Blair and Jack Straw, according to a former government minister with knowledge of the inquiry’s findings.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, the source said the report delivers an “absolutely brutal” verdict on both the build-up to the war in Iraq, but also the mess the UK made of the occupation following Saddam Hussein’s downfall.
Straw, who was Foreign Secretary in Blair’s government, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the then head of MI6, are all expected to be massively criticised, along with other ministers and civil servants.
Dearlove is expected to be blamed for allowing Downing Street to put what the Sunday Times’s source calls a “gloss” on the intelligence presented to Parliament, giving undue prominence to an unreliable claim Saddam could attack British targets within 45 minutes.
The report also says many in government did not know what was going on and that Blair should not have promised George W Bush a year before the war started that he would support military action.
“It is clear that he did commit himself to Bush at an early stage and didn’t want to be seen as letting Bush down,” the former minister said.
But it is supposedly on the UK’s mismanagement of the conflict and the subsequent occupation that the report authors are at their most scathing.
Straw will be criticised for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office personnel sent to run the civilian administration in Iraq and the lack of resources given to them.
The source told the paper: “It is absolutely brutal for Straw. The build-up to war is very crucial. It will damage the reputations of a number of people, Richard Dearlove, as well as Tony Blair and others.
“But there is a second half. The report will say that we really did make a mess of the aftermath.”
They continued: “We sent in inexperienced people. People were put in positions where they couldn’t succeed. We didn’t quite know what we were doing. After the invasion we found it very much more difficult than we had expected. All the things the British had been saying about how much better we were at dealing with post-conflict resolution than the Americans came very badly unstuck.”
The report will also reportedly condemn serious “mistakes” by senior generals running Basra and Iraq’s southern provinces, “where the British army really misjudged and had to be rescued by the Americans”.
Blair, who has already seen the criticisms levelled at him in the report, issued a partial public apology last October.
He said: “I can say that I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong. I also apologise for some of the mistakes in planning and our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime.”
Commenting on the paper’s report, Angus Robertson MP said: “The Iraq war was a foreign policy catastrophe that had a devastating impact on many families across the UK, Iraq and internationally.
“The Chilcot inquiry was demanded because people wanted answers. Yet by the time the report is published it will have been 13 years since the illegal and immoral war was waged and seven since the inquiry was launched.
“Chilcot now looks set to confirm many of the strongest criticisms of the Iraq debacle – this is a scandal of the highest order.”
The report is set to be published on July 6.
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