Britain had no legitimate reasons to join the war. Just like the U.S.

The WMD report in Britain has concluded that the evidence on which the Blair government joined in the US invasion of Iraq was almost entirely wrong. However, no one in the British intelligence community is specifically to blame. The mistaken research had been a "collective operation".

According to Arab News, Butler also of course finds that the contemporary concerns of senior intelligence experts about the accuracy of the WMD dossier being assembled were entirely valid. Butler ascribes the inability of the intelligence community to sort of the wheat from the chaff to the long chain of communication through which items of intelligence have to pass.

The former chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix on Wednesday slammed the British government's dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), claiming that it was "hyped".

"I think it was a spin that was not acceptable. They put exclamation marks where there had been question marks and I think that is hyping, a spin, that leads the public to the wrong conclusions," said Blix.