Here’s what the report of Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the invasion of Iraq did not say.

Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, delivers a speech following the publication of The Iraq Inquiry Report by John Chilcot, in London, Britain July 6, 2016. REUTERS/Stefan Rousseau/Pool

It did not say that Tony Blair, the Labour prime minister (1997-2007) who took the decision to join the United States in invading Iraq early in 2003, was a liar. He told his cabinet, the House of Commons, the British nation and the world that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s homicidal ruler, possessed weapons of mass destruction because he believed it; not because he was so hell bent on waging war that he lied to persuade the British to allow him to do so.

It did not say that, in pursuit of this aim, Blair ordered the intelligence which pointed to WMD possession to be falsified. The British MI6, like the CIA, the French DGSE, the German BND and many other services thought Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, and was striving to obtain nuclear capability, and told its prime minister so.

It did not say that Blair had hatched a secret agreement with President George W. Bush to go to war with him, come what may. Blair, like all British premiers, did want to be on side with the Americans, but he tried to moderate his America counterpart’s impatience, persuading him to seek (vainly) United Nations approval twice and finally chose to go in with Bush because it was “morally and strategically right.”

All of these charges have been made against Blair, especially by the far left, which has tied the albatross of Iraq around his neck so successfully than the British news media now barely mention his name without reminding their audience of his culpability. The far-left leader of Labour today, Jeremy Corbyn, counted out, in parliament -- with appropriate inflation -- the reasons why Blair had presided over “a catastrophe.” It will not save Corbyn from leading his party to defeat and/or break up, if he isn’t forced out or gives up in face of the all-but-total hostility of his fellow parliamentarians and the plunging opinion polls. But at least he had had a moment of happiness.

In fact, another charge, rarely heard before Chilcot made it with some force in his report, has real substance. It is that the UK, mostly on Blair’s watch but finally under that of his successor, Gordon Brown, took its forces out of Iraq. They had been striving -- unsuccessfully -- to contain the civil war in the southern port of Basra, long before the Iraqi military was capable of replacing them. At one point – Chilcot recounts in his report – Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice asked if it was true that the Brits were seeking a quick exit. It was, and it excited the contempt of many American officers.

Fifty years before that retreat, Britain – with its allies France and Israel – had been forced to abandon their attempt to remove the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser and gain control of the Suez Canal. The U.S. president, Dwight Eisenhower, was furious the project had gone ahead against his wishes, and threatened to destroy the British financial system to bring it to heel. It is commonly said this was the end of the UK’s dreams of empire. In Basra in 2006 to 2007, the public’s belief that its armed forces were capable of almost anything went down the same memory hole. The Middle East is cruel to those who meddle in it.

Blair sincerely wanted to depose a monster – Saddam effortlessly took first prize in that gallery – and had laid out, in a now-famous speech in Chicago in 1999, the reasons why UN members had a “duty to protect” citizens of countries whose rulers waged war on them. . He argued the world community had a duty to intervene to remove murderous tyrants who oppressed their own citizens and threatened their neighbors. It became known as “the responsibility to protect” and the “Blair doctrine.”

In his haste to give flesh to his doctrine, Blair made the decision to invade with the Americans too hastily, hardened up the caveats in the intelligence to certainties, didn’t consult colleagues. And in deposing Saddam – that part done, largely by the United States, quickly, surgically – other monsters were released, and their descendants, as the Islamic State, still stalk about the land. On Sunday, IS detonated a bomb in a Baghdad market, and at least 250 people died.

It is probably true, as Blair said in a statement after the report’s publication, that had Saddam remained in power he would likely have re-acquired WMD; and had the Arab Spring of 2011 erupted in Iraq, he would have put it down with at least as much brutality as his neighbor, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. But these are history’s ifs. Blair must live with the stony facts he put on the ground.

Ghastly of face, clearly holding in a well of emotion with some strain, Blair told a press conference on Wednesday that he could not apologize for ridding the world of a brute; and said that those who died did not do so uselessly, but in a battle against extremism which is the world’s largest challenge. He knows he is speaking, mainly, to the unconvertible. He has become Blair of Iraq as surely as Lawrence was of Arabia – and with much less honor.

Blair was a major politician, who hauled the Labour Party to the right. He left it as a just-left-of-center grouping, well placed to take the middle ground of a usually conservative country. It has gone far from that under Corbyn – so far, that its inability to offer robust opposition is part of the sudden instability that has afflicted the country after Brexit.

Blair, a man of generally cheerful outward demeanour, has been badly – but not fatally - hurt by the report. He is reminded hourly, by the many media interviews with dead soldiers’ relatives, of his responsibility. He is witnessing the likely end of Britain’s membership of a union he saw as one of the 20th century’s great achievements.

The late Enoch Powell, the brilliant, dark presence in post-war British politics, famously said that “all political lives… end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” Blair, who had many successes in his political life, may be chewing on that mordant saying this week, together with David Cameron, Boris Johnson and soon, probably, Corbyn. Britain is now in a wretched state politically, and it won’t recover its famous equilibrium any time soon.