Blair: Iraq war 'right' despite WMD
Updated on 12 December 2009
In the midst of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, Tony Blair has said it would have been right to topple Saddam Hussein even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
The former prime minister, who is expected to appear before the inquiry early next year, said it was Saddam's "threat to the region" that had convinced him it was right to invade.
His stance was supported by the Iraqi government but condemned by Hans Blix, the former head of the UN's weapons inspection team.
In an interview to be broadcast tomorrow on BBC1's Fern Britton Meets ... Tony Blair, he said: "I would still have thought it right to remove him. Obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat," he said.
"I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons still in charge but it's incredibly difficult.
"I sympathise with the people who were against it for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end, I had to take the decision."
He added: "It was the notion of him as a threat to the region, of which the development of WMD was obviously one, and because you'd had 12 years of United Nations to and fro on this subject, he used chemical weapons on his own people - so this was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind."
The former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell said that Mr Blair would not have obtained the support of the Cabinet or Parliament for war if he had been so open about his view on regime change at the time.
"In spite of experience, in spite of the benefit of hindsight, Mr Blair still does not realise just how much of a foreign policy disaster Britain's involvement in the military action against Iraq turned out to be," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
"I have no doubt whatsoever that if Mr Blair had told his Cabinet what he is now saying, he'd have found it very difficult to keep all of them - he did of course lose Robin Cook and eventually Clare Short.
"But the one place he would have undoubtedly failed would have been in the House of Commons. He would not have obtained the endorsement of the House of Commons on 18 March 2003 if he had been as frank with the House of Commons then as he appears to be willing to be frank with the BBC now."
