WASHINGTON – Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized Sunday for “mistakes” made in the Iraq War and acknowledged the invasion helped give rise to ISIS.
Blair (inset) was President George W. Bush’s most visible ally in the 2003 invasion of Iraq that both leaders justified as a way to stop Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction.
“I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because, even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought,” Blair said on CNN.
“So I can apologize for that. I can also apologize, by the way, for some of the mistakes in planning and certainly our mistake in our understanding of what would happened once you removed the regime.”
Blair, however, stopped short of altogether regretting the invasion, which toppled the regime and led to Hussein’s execution in 2006.
“I find it hard to apologize for removing Saddam. I think even from today, in 2015, it is better that he’s not there than that he is there.”
The prolonged war put the Middle East in chaos. Tens of thousands of Iraqis perished and nearly 4,500 US troops and 179 British soldiers were killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Since Hussein’s fall, swaths of Iraq have been overrun by ISIS extremists waging an aggressive terror campaign and recruitment of sympathizers.
Asked whether the US-led invasion gave rise to ISIS, Blair said: “I think that there are elements of truth in that.”
“Of course, you can’t say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015,” he added.
“But it’s important also to realize, one, that the Arab Spring which began in 2011 would also have had its impact on Iraq today, and two, ISIS actually came to prominence from a base in Syria and not in Iraq.”
Blair, who was dubbed a Bush’s “poodle” in the UK for his politically unpopular alliance, still is not convinced another tactic would have been better.
“We have tried intervention and putting down troops in Iraq; we’ve tried intervention without putting in troops in Libya; and we’ve tried no intervention at all but demanding regime change in Syria,” he said. “It’s not clear to me that, even if our policy did not work, subsequent policies have worked better.”