Introduction

Eleven years ago, on March 8, 2003, Tony Blair, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, introduced and then defended a motion in the House of Commons urging the Members of Parliament to, among other things,

After a debate of many hours, with the support of the Conservative Opposition, but against the position of many Labour and Liberal Members of Parliament (MPs), and defying huge public protests, British parliament voted to go to war against Iraq – as did the conservative governments in the USA and Spain, led by George W. Bush and José María Aznar, respectively. Defending his motion, and according to the official record in Hansard, Blair argued:

After a decade, we now know the consequences of that parliamentary decision and the ensuing war. Using his very words, we now also know “with history” that what Tony Blair in his motion presupposed to be true, namely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) – a main reason to go to war, as the motion suggests – turned out to be false. Does this mean that Tony Blair lied in his motion? Or was he simply mistaken and ill-informed by the security services of the UK and the USA?