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Brown defends controversial decision to invade Iraq

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, March 5, IRNA -- Prime Minister Gordon Brown Friday defended the controversial decision to invade Iraq as peace protester accused him of having “as much blood on his hands” as his predecessor Tony Blair by being the “paymaster general” of the war.

"I think it was the right decision and made for the right reasons,” Brown told the Iraq inquiry, before going on to express regret that he had not been able to persuade the US to take post-war planning "seriously enough" to ensure a "just peace".

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was a "serial violator" of UN resolutions and a clear message had to be sent to "rogue states" that international law could not be flouted, he said. But the prime minister, who was chancellor of the exchequer at the time of the 2003 invasion, told the inquiry he had been kept in the dark by Blair in the run-up to the war, yet still felt convinced by intelligence briefings that Iraq was a threat that "had to be dealt with".

His involvement in planning, finance, discussions and decision-making while serving as chancellor but felt frustration with US politicians in the build-up to the war.

Outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in central London, peace protesters said that Brown had the power to scupper the war just by the threat of resignation and that he choose not to.

“As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown signed the cheques that made the war possible,” Stop the War Coalition said, while parading a giant cheque for the £8.5 billion to represent Britain’s cost of the war. The cost was slaughtering 655,000 plus Iraqi civilians, displacing of four million others and the deaths of 179 British soldiers killed in action, the UK’s largest peace movement said.

The prime minister accepted that there "lessons to be learnt" from the controversial war. "It took seven days to win the battle, but it's taken seven years to win the peace," he said.

There will be future interventions which means there must be better international cooperation and another lesson was that spy chiefs had to be "more sure" about the nature of the intelligence they receive.

Responding to criticism from former cabinet colleagues to earlier sessions of the inquiry, Brown insisted that he had imposed "no barrier" on funding the military and had tried to place a sharper emphasis on post-war reconstruction.

But Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Iraq in June 2004, questioned his testimony saying that if there was the money, why was it not used in giving troops the adequate equipment. “I don't see any emotion or anything, I just see a politician that doesn't say sorry about what happened. He knows they were in the wrong. I would like him to tell the truth and say he wasn't for it in the beginning,” said Rose, who founded Military Families against the War campaign group.
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End News / IRNA / News Code 995082