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Everyone is too willing blame Tony Blair. Put yourselves in his position; some crazy leader has invaded a small state Kuwait, gassed 1 million Kurdish, you just liberated Kuwait but failed to disarmed Iraq. Couples year later, September 11 incident, you received reports that Saddam has weapon of mass distruction & refused UN inspection. He does not respect human right or international opinion.....so why not take him out! There is a price to pay, you hope your citizen will understand. They will blame you if something bad happen in the future but if you take him out they will blame you for the lost of lives and financial cost. Be a great leader & accept the consequences......he is Tony Blair! I respect you.

It is typical when some action does not do as planned, there are so many politician and reporter looking for someone to blame. People read into ulterior motives for Blair action. Stop trying to read bewteen the lines....he had a job to do.

"Mr Blair argued that the war was lawful, notwithstanding claims to the contrary by some of the government's legal advisors, and he was questioned about the controversial claim 20002 dossier which held that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction at 45 minutes' notice."

Rip Van Marcus here. Wow, I thought I'd just taken a nap. When I fell asleep it was about 18,000 years ago. Funny, back in 2002 there was also a guy named Tony Blair who did exactly the same thing. My, my, things never seem to change much do they. History repeats itself.

While the Iraq war inquiry is a good exercise in democracy. Trying to belittle Mr Blair is totally unacceptable. Any body who has been following events in Iraq since 1991 knows that the world is better off without Saddam and his regime. Including Russia and France who had vested interests in Iraq. Off course our young men and woman laid down their lives, the consequences of not intervening would have been far more disastrous.

charles lim,

Bizarrely wrong post there. I think the most far out bit was

"some crazy leader has invaded a small state Kuwait, gassed 1 million Kurdish,"

You're off by about two orders of magnitude.

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head – the twin towers set this all off. 18 of the 19 hi-jackers were Saudi Arabian(citizens of a fundamentalist islamist state). The attack planned by Alky Ada (as Gordon brown says it) in Afganistan( apparently by the Saudi Arabian Bin Laden) and executed by operatives resident at various times in various capital cities of Europe and who trained on flight simulators in the USA. Meanwhile Saddam is dictator of a secular state where Alky Ada not permitted to operate.
After twin towers G W Bush gathers up all the many connections of the bin laden family and other Saudi oil connected nationals present in the states and flies them home pronto.
Then he decides to invade IRAQ and Blair with an eye on the main chance of all those American bank directorships after retirement gives Bush the benefit of whatever moral authority briitain has left!

As a lawyer Mr Blair should know that IT is illegal to topel a regime full stop. Whether Saddam was an evil man or not he was still a country's leader that according to international law should have been brought to book as we are doing now to Al-Bashir of Sudan. That is if we are not going to change the law of the land to let Israelly accused of war crime of the hook. It unfortunate that ´óÏó´«Ã½ presenters do not tackle spin doctors who justify bending the rule for some and insisting on implementing the rules on. A guest on ´óÏó´«Ã½ news last night was allowed to scaremonger and exagerate the Halabjah incident, the presenter should have asked that guest who ordered Saddam to that? It was the governmentS who supplied him with the gas who wanted him to swart the advancement of IRAN through those kurdish Irany villages. Why did't we invade Iraq THEN? Iraq was a better place under Saddam despite his brutality. Much better than Egypt , Tunisia, Morrocco, Zimbabwe, China who are suffering the brutality without the wealth and advance the Iraqis had. The difference is they are useful to the West and Israel in some cases, or that we dare not upsetting the others.

There is no harm in each country progressing its own agenda, but please give people some credit and come clean. Would any member of the public in the UK be allowed to kill someone who threatens their life and is known to be a nuisance such as an intruder or armed robber? the answer is NO because the law says so. Why is Mr Blair allowed to flaunt a clear and non ambigious part of the UN charter , not to take part in regime change, allowed to do so WITHOUT REGRETS???? I mourn every soldier and every life lost just because Blair and Bush believed that Saddam was a rogue. This is History, nations destiny and people lives we are taking about. The solace from his reelection is another SPIN, if people had the facts above talked about and exposed they would not have voted for him to see their loved ONES fighting in a country that had no LINKS was Alqaeda on the excuse " they may have done". PULL THE OTHER ONE ITS GOT BELLS ON.

TO CHARLES LIM,

Lets apply your dogma to iSRAEL WHO JUST REBUFFED THE GOLDSTONE INQUIRY FINDINGS.

Ignored every UN resolution

Wants us to change the of our country to let their war criminals run free.

Murder women and children on the excuse of defending their country, which incidently has been invaded by them in 1948. SO IT IS NOT THEIRS ANYWAY.

Lets not cherry pick what suits us. Saddam invaded Kuwait. Israel invaded Egypt , Jordan,Syria and Lebanon ( or you did not know that ) Where are the likes of Blair and Bush. SAD isn't.

I find it totally insulting and disgraceful that Mr Blair treats the voters who elected him to office with such contempt. He does not regret his decision to condemn innocent children and civilians to death as part of collateral damage not to mention the young lives of the members of the British army based on his intention to remove Saddam Hussein for "regime change".

His decision to go to war was ILLEGAL and as such he should be subjected to a war crimes tribunal. He claims 1441 carried that this was the last warning to Saddam Hussein, but when Hans Blix mentioned that he had no evidence of WMD and requested more time to verify the false claim by intelligence, he was not allowed to do so. Was the USA and Britain worried that he would actually find no WMDs, stripping them of the alleged excuse for war? In any case, Mr Blair said in his TV interview that he would have gone for regime change even if there were no WMD. If that is not a confession of his intention, what is? The excuse that the PM of England could not handle an interview is just insulting to ones intelligence.

The Chilcot inquiry should have questioned him on that point, but unfortunately they did not have the teeth and no lawyers on their panel.

Further, the excuse that 9.11 changed the tactics for Iraq is pathetic. Iraq was not linked to Al Queda, & did not poses any WMD. 9.11 was not committed with WMD's but with aeroplanes. The only country in the region to have stockpiles of WMD's was and still is ISREAL. Israel has a history of systematically assassinating opponents to its occupation of Palestine, has used WMD's (the phosphorous bombs) against CIVILLIANS in Gaza in 2009, has fired its weapons into airspace belonging to other countries and is currently held unaccountable for its actions. It continues to build in the occupied territories, again AGAINST INTERNATIONAL LAW and has built a wall besieging the civilian refugees. This is apartheid. They always get the media coverage of the holocaust in the 1940's but what is not accurately reported is that they have not learnt how that felt and not do many of the same atrocities to the occupied Palestinians without the international community going to war for their regime change.

Mr Blair now is the middle east envoy to try to sort out this problem, is he going to advice military action against Israel? I don't think so do you?

Mr Blair took the UK to war for his own aims, in my opinion, to settle a grudge that his best pal, Mr Bush Jnr had with Saddam as his Saddam Hussein had attempted to assassinate his father and mother in Kuwait. Were those 2 boys playing with the means entrusted to them by the voters for personal vendettas? Mr Blair stood to gain in his professional standing in the western political community by buddying up to Mr Bush. They made the rest of the world hate us and this has now spurred more international terrorism as a result. Well done Mr Blair.

Sometimes I wonder where people like charles lim get their info. Since he obviously has or has access to a computer it would be fairly easy to learn that the population of the Kurdish region of Iraq in 1988 was roughly 15-20% of the entire nation of Iraq, which was also roughly 30-35 million then. Excuse me, but "gassing 1 million Kurdish" would have practically wiped them all out. As well, the "coalition", led by Blair&Bush, has killed far more Iraqis than the admittedly evil Saddam ever did!

So the story is, Saddam was a bad man, and bad for the Iraq, and the world, and had to go.
Thereafter, the UK forces in Basra, hand power to religious nutters who kill scores of barbers for shaving beards, and fill the streets with the bodies of butchered women, guilty of some other sort of unislamic behaviour.
Worth the effort, the treasure, and the lives?

First he joins a Crusade against Moslems in Afghanistan and Iraq and then he compounds his felony by becoming a Catholic. What would such a man not do? What is beyond the pale in the possible actions he might take, the things that he might say that would surprise us? Come to think of it, isn't that what the Kings of England did in fabled times, kings like Richard II? Didn't they call him Richard the Lionhearted for it? What should we call those who would do the opposite, George Galloway the chickenhearted? George Galloway the supplicant? (if those don't get this posting deleted by the KG´óÏó´«Ã½, the logical next one would.)

I have two things to quote. One could be banned, since it could be construed as a threat. (For those curious, go get a copy of Kipling's "Mesopotamia"...)
The other one is Isaiah 5:2: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"
There's also a verse in the New Testament in which the Apostle Paul says of those who say "Let us do evil, that good may come."- that their damnation is just. I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of Blair's priest...

The reasons given for going to war seem slightly baffling, as other countries ((most notably North Korea) have nuclear weapons and oppressive regimes. Maybe it's because Iraq is a Muslim country and was a popular target after 9/11. I don't see how he can say that the world is a safer place because Sadaam Hussein was removed.