JEREMY Corbyn has said he will apologise for the war in Iraq on behalf of Labour, if he becomes the party’s leader. In a statement released to the Guardian newspaper, Corbyn said under his leadership Labour “will never again unnecessarily put our troops under fire and our country’s standing in the world at risk”.
Corbyn, who is the frontrunner in the contest, then went on to say that Labour “will never make the same mistake again” and they would never “flout the United Nations and international law.”
The Islington North MP continued: “So it is past time that Labour apologised to the British people for taking them into the Iraq war on the basis of deception and to the Iraqi people for the suffering we have helped cause.
“Under our Labour, we will make this apology.”
The statement adds weight to the notion a Corbyn-led Labour would be unlikely to support airstrikes in Syria.
David Cameron is hopeful of forming a broad coalition in support of military action against Daesh when Parliament resumes in September.
With the 56 SNP MPs likely to vote against airstrikes, the Government could be defeated if Labour MPs back Corbyn.
Although the military action in 2003 was proposed by the Labour government, 139 of the party’s backbenchers rebelled.
The Iraq Body Count project puts the civilian death toll at 219,000 since 2003. 179 British personnel died.
On Thursday, Yvette Cooper, who voted for the invasion, said the party had got the decision to go to war wrong.
Cooper told the BBC’s World At One: “We need the Chilcot report out to know exactly what happened, but we were wrong as there were no weapons of mass destruction and also the strategy was wrong because it drew resources from Afghanistan at a crucial stage.”
Tony Blair has often been put under pressure to apologise, and Ed Miliband never went as far as apologising.
Corbyn’s statement spelled out why he would apologise. he said: “We found ourselves in the regrettable position of being aligned with one of the worst right-wing governments in US history, even as liberal opinion in the US was questioning the headlong descent into war.”
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