Reactions are emerging toward an expression of apology by the former British prime minister Tony Blair for taking Britain to war in Iraq back in 2003. Critics say they are unimpressed with Blair's apology, stressing that they see it as a typical defense tactic which has been carefully designed to divert the public opinion and avoid culpability.
"He's doing what he is master at which is spin control," said Ian Williams, the senior analyst of Foreign Policy in Focus, on Sunday.
"He's trying to shape the discussions and the agenda. So what he did is going to be transformed from a crime to a mistake," he told Press TV.
Blair in an interview with the CNN said he was sorry for "mistakes" made in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
"I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because, even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought," Blair said in an exclusive interview on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS.
Williams told Press TV that Blair is using a tactic that will eventually make people forget the blame on Blair to cause significant sufferings to the British nation.
"People are forgiving your mistakes, generally speaking," he told Press TV's UK Desk in an exclusive interview.
"By saying that what he did was based on mistaken intelligence, what he is doing is diverting the fact that he deliberately distorted the intelligence reports to make it mistaken," he said.
"The whole thing is about him avoiding culpability for his part in what even he now has to admit was an unmitigated disaster."