LONDON — At a memorial service honoring Britons who died during the Iraq war, the Archbishop of Canterbury said today it will take time for historians and moralists to decide if the conflict was justified.
Rowan Williams — an outspoken critic of Britain’s role in the war — told a congregation at St. Paul’s Cathedral that there are lessons to be learned from the conflict. His audience included Queen Elizabeth II, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Iraq President Jalal Talabani, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, top officers in the British military, veterans of the war and families of British soldiers killed in Iraq.
“The conflict in Iraq will, for a long time yet, exercise the historians, the moralists, the international experts,” Williams said. “In a world as complicated as ours has become, it would be a very rash person who would feel able to say without hesitation, this was absolutely the right or the wrong thing to do, the right or the wrong place to be.”
The spiritual leader of the 77 million-member Anglican Communion said the conflict should teach us that “there is a time to keep silence, a time to let go of the satisfyingly overblown language that is so tempting to human beings when war is in the air.”
He said that before the war started, “there were those among both policy makers and commentators who were able to talk about it without really measuring the price, the cost of justice.”
Prince William — currently training to be a search-and-rescue pilot in the Royal Air Force — attended the service with his father, Prince Charles, and his stepmother, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Princess Anne and Prince Edward also were there.
British troops completed their pullout from Iraq in May, ending a six-year campaign that saw 178 British servicemen and women and one civilian Ministry of Defense worker killed.
The decision by the Blair administration to join the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 was very unpopular in Britain, and hundreds of thousands of people protested in the run-up to the conflict.
In June, Brown announced an inquiry to examine decisions made before, during, and after the operation.
The war continues to divide the country.
At a reception after the service, Peter Brierly, whose 28-year-old son Lance Cpl. Shaun Brierly was killed in March 2003, refused to shake Blair’s proffered hand. “I’m not shaking your hand, you’ve got blood on it,” he said.
“I believe Tony Blair is a war criminal,” Brierly said later. “I can’t bear to be in the same room as him. I can’t believe he’s been allowed to come to this reception.”
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