VirginMedia
11 December 2009 11:55pm
Tony Blair said he believes it still would have been right to have invaded Iraq even if it was known then that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.
The former Prime Minister – who is due to give evidence in the New Year to the Chilcot inquiry into the war – said other arguments would have been needed to justify the military action in 2003.
But in an interview to be broadcast on BBC1’s Fern Britton Meets … Tony Blair, he said the threat posed by Saddam to the wider region meant it was right to remove him from power.
“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. I can’t really think we’d be better with him and his two sons still in charge but it’s incredibly difficult,” he said.
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 upper most in my mind.”
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