Gordon Brown privately committed to holding a formal inquiry into the Iraq invasion and its aftermath in a letter to the head of the Fabian Society, a think-tank affiliated with the Labour Party. Writing to general secretary Sunder Katwala, the prime minister said the government needed to draw every possible lesson from the war, while insisting conditions on the ground made the timing inappropriate.
Brown pointed to the fragility of the situation in Iraq as his reason for delay, arguing that a diversion of attention could reverse the progress made on security, economic, and political fronts. He had previously acknowledged mistakes in post-war planning. His predecessor Tony Blair had resisted calls for an inquiry throughout his tenure, citing four earlier reports that had already examined the background to the conflict.
A Channel 4 poll marking the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion found more than two-thirds of respondents wanted coalition forces withdrawn. Britain had roughly 4,100 troops in Iraq, most of them near the southern city of Basra, and around 7,800 more in Afghanistan.
Demonstrations over the weekend drew approximately 10,000 marchers in London and between 1,000 and 1,500 in Glasgow, according to police. Five years earlier, an estimated one million people had marched through the capital in the weeks before the 2003 invasion.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in March 2008, in its own words.