General Sir Michael Rose is a retired British Army general, as well as commanding 22 SAS, he was also appointed Commander of UNPROFOR Bosnia in 1994 during the Yugoslav Wars

Anyone who doubts Tony Blair's self-delusion over Iraq should look at the 2,800-word essay he has posted on his website in defence of his decision to go to war.

He remains in complete denial over the disaster he inflicted not only on the people of Iraq, but also on many millions throughout the Middle East as a result of the 2003 invasion.

It goes without saying that if you start a war, you should be sure that the end result will be demonstrably better than the situation prior to the conflict.

Only someone who has lost touch with reality could possibly claim Iraq today is more stable or that life has become better for its inhabitants.

Blair accepts not a shred of responsibility and still refuses to apologise for taking us to war. So let us examine what he says point by point – and show his false logic for what it is.



CHEMICAL WEAPONS

CLAIM: One of the most extraordinary arguments by Tony Blair in his essay is that, because Syria's President Assad has used chemical weapons, this retrospectively justifies invading Iraq, where no such weapons were found.

'Is it likely that, knowing what we now know about Assad, Saddam, who had used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and his own people, would have refrained from returning to his old ways?' he asks.

TRUTH: Leave aside, as too preposterous to merit a response, the argument that because one dictator in one country has used chemical weapons, it follows that another in a completely different country would have done so too.

It was already quite clear by 2003 that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was no threat to anyone.

For, following the Iraq/Iran war and Saddam's disastrous invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraq was being adequately contained militarily by the West.

It was not only subject to punitive economic sanctions and UN arms inspections, but was being bombed almost daily by the US Air Force in Operation Desert Fox. Although Saddam Hussein may have retained a latent ambition to obtain weapons of mass destruction, neither the UN inspectors before the war or the Iraq Survey Group afterwards have ever found any trace of such weapons.

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Former Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested the current chaos in Iraq could have been avoided if the West had bombed Syria

Saddam Hussein, pictured here during his trial in 2006 in Baghdad, was no threat to any country by 2003

WE'D BEATEN AL QAEDA

CLAIM: Blair says the West had overcome the terrorist threat in Iraq before withdrawing. 'Three or four years ago, al Qaeda in Iraq was a beaten force,' he writes.

TRUTH: To say al Qaeda was ever 'defeated' in Iraq is nonsense. True, significant damage was done to its infrastructure while US and British troops were still in the country, but it was never defeated.

Like all insurgents, the terrorist group merely laid low until the enemy became weak or distracted. But the key point is that neither al Qaeda nor any other extreme jihadist group had any presence in

Iraq before the 2003 invasion. Saddam Hussein was far too brutal to allow that.

After the invasion, insurgents piled into the country. They were encouraged by disenchanted loyalists from Saddam's Ba'athist party – all Sunni Muslims – who were furious at the toppling of their leader and the rise to power of rival Shia Muslims under Western auspices.

The Sunnis had, after all, ruled in Iraq since 1638, when the Sunni Turkish Ottomans took over Baghdad from the Persians.

THE ARAB SPRING

CLAIM: If Iraq hadn't been invaded in 2003, says Blair, Saddam Hussein's regime would not have survived anyway – 'it would have been engulfed by the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings that swept Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria.

TRUTH: The invasion of Iraq and its terrible aftermath was the cause of the Arab Spring. This is because the young people involved in the uprisings throughout the Middle East felt empowered by the removal of Saddam, who had ruled with an iron fist for 24 years.

Many were appalled by what they regarded in Iraq as Western interference in Arab affairs, which encouraged them to overthrow their pro-Western dictators.

It was no surprise subsequently that what started out as a series of anti-West pro-democracy revolutions would soon be hijacked by Islamic extremists.

BLAME IRAQ'S PM

CLAIM: Rather than accept responsibility himself, Blair says the current Iraqi regime is to blame for the chaos: 'The sectarianism of the Maliki government snuffed out what was a genuine opportunity to build a cohesive Iraq'.

TRUTH: To blame Prime Minister Maliki takes some beating for sheer gall. Maliki may be corrupt, partisan, authoritarian and a puppet of Iran's Shia Muslim regime.

But Blair brazenly seems to dismiss the fact that he would never have been in power had the 2003 invasion not taken place. General Colin Powell, US Secretary of State for Defence at the time of the invasion, famously remarked: 'You break it, you own it'. Blair broke Iraq but simply won't accept any responsibility for doing so.

IT'S OBAMA'S FAULT TOO

CLAIM: Blair suggests that President Barack Obama should have kept his soldiers in Iraq: 'There will be a debate about whether the withdrawal of US troops happened too soon'.

TRUTH: US troops had been in Iraq for nearly nine years – from March 2003 to December 2011 – numbering 170,000 in 500 bases at their peak. The war had by then cost the US government some $800billion and 4,500 Americans had been killed.

Does Blair think America should have kept up this loss of blood and treasure indefinitely? In addition, the US had spent a staggering $30billion on training and equipping the Iraq army.

What they could never do, however long they stayed, was to give them the will to fight.

MILITARY STRIKES

CLAIM: We need a decisive military response, says Blair, 'including military strikes against extremists in Iraq and Syria'.

TRUTH: As we have seen, military intervention invariably makes things worse. So far, our adventures in the Middle East have served only to increase hatred of the West and recruit still more insurgents to fight alongside our enemy.