Gordon Brown took a major political gamble yesterday by describing Tony Blair's decision to go to war in Iraq as "the right decision for the right reasons" and insisting that "everything that Mr Blair did during this period, he did properly". Dogged by a reputation for disowning unpopular decisions, Brown used his appearance at the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war to deliver a firm defence of Britain joining the US-led invasion, a decision taken and executed when Blair was prime minister and Brown was chancellor. In his most prolonged inquisition on Iraq since the invasion seven years ago, Brown accepted he had been fully involved in the run-up to the invasion, underlined the gravity of going to war, praised the military and, unlike Blair, expressed his sadness at the huge loss of civilian life in Iraq. His only major equivocation was regret at the way in which he had failed to persuade the Americans to handle the aftermath differently. Brown's decision to ally himself with Blair's war, if not the American neo-cons' conduct, may lose him support from those that believed he privately opposed the war, but his aides reckoned he would be more damaged if he tried to distance himself from a war he funded . In four hours of testimony shorn of the electricity surrounding Blair's grilling a month ago, he also risked the wrath of military top brass and bereaved families by firmly rejecting criticism that he deprived the armed forces of equipment. "The one fundamental truth", he said, was "that every requirement made to us by military commanders was answered; no request was ever turned down". Former senior military figures took issue last night with those comments. Admiral Lord Boyce, the chief of the defence staff up to the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, said that the MoD had been "starved of funds". "He's dissembling, he's being disingenuous. It's just not the case that the Ministry of Defence was given everything it needed," he told The Times. Colonel Stuart Tootal, a former commander of 3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, said: "I am quite staggered by the lack of any sense of responsibility. He was the man with the purse strings." Justifying the war, Brown told the inquiry: "We will be seen as a generation that had to deal with a post-cold war era in which we had both terrorism and aggressor states like Iraq." He described Iraq as "a persistent serial violator" of 14 international UN resolutions. "We cannot have an international community that works if either we have terrorists breaking the rules, or in this case aggressor states that refuse to obey the laws of the international community." But in a broadside against Donald Rumsfeld, the then US defence secretary, Brown said: "I never subscribed to what you might call the neo-conservative proposition: that somehow, at the barrel of a gun, overnight liberty or democracy could be conjured up." On spending, he bombarded his inquisitors with statistics, claiming he had to rein in the MoD in late 2003 when its budget management spiralled "out of control". Requests for heavily armoured military vehicles, replacing Snatch vehicles, were met immediately in 2006 at a cost of 90m with new, more heavily armoured replacements. "I have to stress it is not for me to make the military decisions on the ground about the use of particular vehicles," Brown said. The total cost of the war was 8bn, he said, presenting the Treasury with real problems. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: "This was the day Gordon Brown finally had to come clean and admit that he believes the Iraq war was right. How can we trust a man who still believes that this illegal war and all the horror it has caused was right?" Brown also disclosed: He did not see private correspondence on the war between President George Bush and Blair, and did not expect to. He was not told of the attorney general Lord Goldsmith's initial doubts about the legality of invasion, but said constitutionally the cabinet only needed to be informed of Goldsmith's ultimate view. He did not see the Iraq options papers drawn up in the Foreign Office in March 2002 and was only brought into serious conversation on an invasion in June 2002, by which time the analytical framework was set. He criticised the excessive informality that had characterised decision making in the run-up to the war, and implicitly criticised the fact that parliament was given the chance to vote on the war only after the cabinet had made its decision. He met the intelligence agencies five times about Iraq, starting in February 2002, but only discovered after the war the extent to which they were dependent on the same unreliable sources. Although he portrayed himself as a man looking at the financial implications of the war, as opposed to a frontline figure in the diplomacy, Brown agreed he had been kept in the loop. "I did not at any point feel that I lacked the information that was necessary," he said. He admitted he only prepared a paper on postwar reconstruction for the Americans after a cabinet committee 11 days before the invasion. He said: "I cannot take personal responsibility for everything that went wrong, It is one of my regrets that I was not able to be more successful on pushing the Americans that the planning for reconstruction was essential, just the same as planning for the war." (The Guardian)