Blair defends Iraq's invasion even without WMDs
Former British premier, Blair, who is to appear before a long-awaited official Iraq war inquiry early next year, said London would have used other ways to justify its support for the 2003 US-led war to oust Saddam.
"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 told BBC One's Fern Britton Meets program.
"I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons still in charge but it's incredibly difficult," he added, according to comments released before the program was broadcast.
Blair, who controversially backed then US president George W. Bush in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, accepted that families of those who died blamed him, but insisted relatives of soldiers could be proud of their sacrifice.
According to then President of the United States, George W. Bush and then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair, the reasons for the invasion were to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.
As evidence supporting US and British claims about Iraqi WMDs and links to terrorism has weakened, some claim supporters of the invasion have increasingly shifted their justification to the human rights violations of the Saddam regime.
Leading human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch have argued, however, that they believe human rights concerns were never a central justification for the invasion, nor do they believe that military intervention was justifiable on humanitarian grounds, most significantly because "the killing in Iraq at the time was not of the exceptional nature that would justify such intervention."
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