Chilcot delivers

With over two million words, the Chilcot Report will be condensed by others far better than by me.  Some people might say Blair was one of the worst prime ministers but he does have the Northern Irish peace process in the positive ledger and though the invasion of Iraq was a catastrophe, ultimately it did not imperil the national destiny of the UK.  But Chilcot, although not ruling that the was illegal, effectively says just that in his civil service lanaguage: that the war was not one of the 'last resort' nor was it based on self-defence.
I was one of those opposed to the Iraq War long before it happened.  Saddam Hussein was a brute but the worst of his crimes were done with the tacit acceptance of the West, including inadvertently green-lighting the invasion of Kuwait and then permitting the massacre of those groups that rose up to oppose Saddam post-Kuwait liberation ('in the name of stability').  Saddam was merely one of the many unsavoury dictators around the world - you kick down the door of one, you have to kick down the doors of all, otherwise there is no coherence and the world system spikes into frenzied chaos, as has subsequently occurred.  That is why international law exists protecting sovereignty against Trotskyite permanent revolution (many neo-liberals were formerly on the hard-left) but the Bush administration saw international law as an impediment and if the Iraq War fatally weakened it, that would be an ancillary benefit to the Oval Office.
Only if Saddam was committing genocide in the years leading up to the war was humanitarian intervention justified but he wasn't.  The US Senate has concluded that there was a power vacuum in Iraq before the invasion - what Saddam wanted did not necessarily get done. Instead, the war has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (possibly up to a million, by the group commissioned by the British government to investigate genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda) - that is a level of slaughter not seen since Rwanda.
The lies of Blair and Bush were fairly transparent - it had been a manifesto promise of Bush in his election in 2000.  As Ken Clarke said in the Commons at the time of the vote to invade, "It is an insult to the intellect that Iraq poses a threat to us."  But one needs an intellect in the first place for it to be insulted.