Report of the Iraq Inquiry

However wrong it was to take military action on the basis of false intelligence—and I accept my responsibility in that I voted for military action—were not many of us very much influenced by Saddam’s notorious record? His aggression against the Iranian state, a war that lasted eight years, took the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people on both sides, but he was not satisfied with that, and two years later the aggression against Kuwait resulted in the first Gulf war. Would it not also be totally wrong to conclude that had it not been for this invasion—which, as I say, should not have taken place, because it was based on false intelligence—everything would have been fine in the middle east? Look at what is happening in Syria, where we did not intervene—rightly, I believe, and again I was influenced by what happened in relation to what we are discussing now.