Britain’s official inquiry into the Iraq war opened in London on Tuesday with senior Whitehall officials saying they had sought to distance themselves from the “drumbeats of war” and “regime change” that started emerging from George W. Bush’s administration as early as 2001.
On the first day of the inquiry headed by Sir John Chilcot, a former civil servant, senior Whitehall officials testified that parts of the Bush administration had been determined to remove Saddam two years before the 2003 invasion.
