“I've come to a conclusion: the justification for the intervention was wrong,” Former British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said of the Iraq War in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, which aired Tuesday.
“[We] may have got rid of Saddam, but it certainly never brought peace,” Prescott added.
Looking back, on the ten-year anniversary of the war, Prescott said everyone should ask themselves whether the war was justified, and whether the true objective was in fact regime change, not weapons of mass destruction.
Prescott said that former Prime Minister Tony Blair “certainly believed” it was because of the alleged weapons of mass destruction.
“I was convinced in America you were already preparing for war, despite us talking about the U.N. You were getting your military machine ready. You were going to do it before the hot summer. So there's no doubt in America - and I told Tony, the Yanks are going in whether you agree or not.”
Prescott admitted that he feels a share of responsibility for the Iraq War.
Blair has also been giving interviews on this tenth anniversary and he admits that the war did not turn out the way he hoped it would. Nonetheless, Blair still insists that invading and toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do at the time.
Prescott told Amanpour that the action that was taken to stop the bloodshed in Kosovo and Sierra Leone helped persuade them to believe that military action in Iraq would be the right thing to do.
“Tony came to the view,” Prescott recalled, “that if no leader of a country was entitled to treat his people like that. He then followed on. It was for all us then to intervene to stop that.”
As the world now debates crises of varying degrees with Iran and in Syria, Prescott did not hold back in articulating what the Iraq experience had taught him.
“[Blair] wants to do it now in Iran, possibly, and Syria. Absolute bloody crazy, in my view,” Prescott said. “You've got to ask yourselves, what are you doing it for, just to get rid of the evil men around the world? Because I've got to tell you, there's been more killings in Iraq since they've left, and still continuing.”