British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has apologized on behalf of the Labour Party for its role in pushing Britain into the Iraq War.
Jeremy Corbyn: “Politicians and political parties can only grow stronger by acknowledging when they get it wrong and by facing up to their mistakes. So I now apologize sincerely on behalf of my party for the disastrous decision to go to war in Iraq. The apology is out first to all the people of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, and the country is still living with the devastating consequence of the war and the forces it unleashed. They have paid the greatest price for the most serious foreign policy calamity of the last 60 years.”
Jeremy Corbyn was the president of Stop the War Coalition. This comes one day after the release of the long-awaited Chilcot report, which blames British Prime Minister Tony Blair for deliberately exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Blair was the longest-serving Labour prime minister in British history. The Chilcot report revealed Blair had been warned multiple times by Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee that the invasion of Iraq would increase the threat of terrorism by al-Qaeda and other militant groups.