On 29 January, Tony Blair appeared before Lord Chilcot’s Iraq inquiry to explain his reasons for leading his country into the Iraq invasion of 2003. The former British prime-minister still justifies the attack on the grounds that Saddam Hussein, according to British intelligence, possessed weapons of mass-destruction. However, the press increasingly contends that this is untrue. Left-leaning weekly the New Statesman leads the case against Blair with testimony from government experts whose advise Blair ignored in the run-up to the war. “Over the years, numerous revelations - including leaked official memos and minutes - have suggested that Blair, in spite of his repeated denials, signed up not simply to disarmament but to regime change (i.e. the overthrow of Saddam) in Iraq a full year before the invasion”. The paper quotes a senior law-lord who calls on the Iraq inquiry to declare the war illegal, which chimes in with campaigns calling for Blair’s arrest and trial as a war criminal.
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