The chairman of the inquiry and former president of the Dutch Supreme Court, Willibrord Davids, presents the commission's findings before Dutch officials on January 12, 2010.
An independent probe investigating the Netherlands’ support for the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq says the US and Britain rushed to war without sufficient legal backing under international law.
The commission’s 551-page report says UN resolutions prior to the outbreak of the war did not provide the mandate for the attack.
“There was insufficient legitimacy” for the invasion, commission chairman Willibrord Davids told journalists in The Hague on Tuesday.
The report further concludes that there was no legal basis for the Iraq war, while accusing the Dutch government of spicing up allegation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — the main mantra on which arguments for war were erected.
The development comes amid deepening public concerns in the countries that joined the US-led war, prompting independent probes in other parts of Europe, including the United Kingdom, to settle the question of the ongoing war’s legality.
The report also confirms that the Netherlands gave political support to war, but notes that the country was never militarily involved in the conflict.