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The long-awaited official report into Britain's invasion of Iraq will finally be published today amid calls for Tony Blair to be held to account. Sir John Chilcot has issued a damning 2.6 million word report into Britain's decision to invade Iraq at the end of a seven-year long inquiry.
Thirteen years after British troops crossed into the country and seven years after the inquiry began its work, Sir John Chilcot will deliver his verdict on the UK's most controversial military engagement of the post-war era. Tony Blair's policy was founded on “flawed intelligence” and the process for deciding that the 2003 war was legal was “far from satisfactory”, it found.
From the outset he made clear he would not rule on whether the invasion in 2003 was legal in terms of international law, pledging to provide a “full and insightful” account of the decision-making process. The Iraq Inquiry found that Mr Blair's government presented evidence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) “with a certainty that was not justified” and troops were sent in before all peaceful options had been exhausted.
But that is unlikely to quell the clamour for some form of legal action against the former prime minister if - as many expect - he is strongly criticised by Sir John and his inquiry panel. Presenting a summary of his inquiry's findings, Sir John hit out at the “wholly inadequate” planning for the period after the fall of Saddam, which saw British troops involved in a prolonged and bloody occupation as terrorist groups gathered power and sectarian conflict spread.
With some families of the British personnel killed and injured in the conflict already dismissing the report as a “whitewash”, Sir John insisted they had not shied away from criticism where it was justified. The former Whitehall mandarin was setting out the findings of his inquiry into the UK's most controversial military engagement since the end of the Second World War, which left at least 150,000 Iraqis - mostly civilians - dead.
He acknowledged frustration at the time taken to complete the report but said they had faced a “huge task” in sifting through the tens of thousands of official documents as well as taking oral evidence from dozens of politicians, generals, diplomats and spies. Although his inquiry did not express a view on whether the invasion was legal, Sir John criticised the way in which Mr Blair and his attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, had reached their decision on the legal basis.
The prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, said charges cannot be brought in relation to the decision to go to war as the court has no jurisdiction over the “crime of aggression”. Sir John said: “The circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for military action were far from satisfactory.”
Sir John originally hoped his report would be ready within two years of starting work in 2009, but it has since been hit by a series of delays. Addressing the issue of WMDs, Sir John said the Joint Intelligence Committee should have made clear to Mr Blair that the intelligence had not established “beyond doubt” that Iraq had either continued to produce chemical and biological weapons or was continuing with efforts to develop a nuclear bomb.
The most serious has been bitter wrangling between the inquiry and the Cabinet Office over the de-classification of hundreds of official documents - most notably communications between Mr Blair and US president George Bush. “It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments,” Sir John said. “They were not challenged, and they should have been.”
In May 2014 it was finally announced an agreement had been reached between Sir John and Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood that “gists or quotes” from the correspondence could be published, although Mr Bush's views would not be reflected. Families of the 179 British soldiers killed in the conflict said they were considering legal action. 
That was followed by a further period of delay while the inquiry carried out the so-called Maxwellisation process - allowing individuals facing criticism the chance to respond before the report was finalised.  
Issues covered by the report include the diplomatic build-up to the invasion following the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 through to the end of the UK occupation in 2009.