That statement directly contradicted Mr Blair's warning to MPs in September 2002 – six months before the invasion – that Saddam's weapons programme was "active, detailed and growing".

The former Prime Minister was making his long-awaited appearance as the star witness before Sir John Chilcot's panel of inquiry, where, despite a nervous start, he delivered a typically unrepentant account of the decision to commit British forces to the US-led invasion of Iraq.

"This isn’t about a lie, or a conspiracy, or a deceit, or a deception, this is a decision," he told the panel.

"And the decision I had to take was, given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over 1 million people whose deaths he caused, given 10 years of breaking UN resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programme?"

Mr Blair was at pains to set the Iraq conflict in the context of the post-9/11 world, explaining that the events of September 11, 2001, had changed the "calculus of risk" for the transatlantic allies.

However, as part of that analysis Mr Blair conceded that the threat posed by Saddam's purported programme to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had not actually grown — only the understanding of that threat.

"It wasn’t that objectively he had done more," he said of the Iraqi leader. "It was that our perception of the risk had shifted."

The comment appeared to contradict Mr Blair's own statement to the Commons on September 24, 2002, as he presented what later became known as the "sexed-up" intelligence dossier on Iraq's WMD programme. Mr Blair told MPs: "His weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down; it is up and running now."

That dossier included the now discredited claim that President Saddam could deploy WMD within 45 minutes.

Several hundred demonstrators — chanting "Jail Tony" and "Blair lied" — gathered outside the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, although the former prime minister managed to slip in via a cordoned-off back entrance two hours before he was due to appear.

It was a far cry from the mass marches of February 2003, a month before the invasion, when millions marched around the country to protest against the looming war.

n those days, Mr Blair was routinely derided as "George Bush's poodle", but today he denied that he had ever made any private deals with the US President before the invasion of Iraq.

Instead, he said, he had always made clear that he would have to join the Americans if it came to military action to overthrow Saddam.

"This is an alliance that we have with the United States of America," he said. "It is not a contract; it's not, 'You do this and we'll do that'."

Mr Blair confirmed that he had discussed the issue of Iraq when he met Mr Bush for private, one-to-one talks at his Texas ranch at Crawford in April 2002, 11 months before the invasion, but he insisted that they did not get into "specifics".

"What I was saying — I was not saying this privately, incidentally, I was saying it in public — was, ‘We are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat’.

"The one thing I was not doing was dissembling in that position. How we proceed in this is a matter that was open. The position was not a covert position, it was an open position. We would be with them in dealing with this threat and how we did that was an open question, and even at that stage I was raising the issue of going to the UN."

But pressed on what he thought Mr Bush took from the meeting, he went further, saying: "I think what he took from that was exactly what he should have taken which was, if it came to military action because there was no way of dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him."

Speaking of the transformation of policy after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers — which he said he had always regarded not as an attack on America but "an attack on us", Mr Blair said: "The fact is, force is always an option. What changed after September 11 was that if necessary — and there was no other way of dealing with this threat — we were going to remove him."

He added: "The primary consideration for me was to send an absolutely powerful, clear and unremitting message that, after September 11, if you were a regime engaged in WMD, you had to stop."

Mr Blair insisted that he kept open his options for dealing with Iraq in the run-up to the Crawford talks. An "options paper" — widely available on the internet but still officially classified — was drawn up in March 2002 which outlined the choices open to Britain for tackling Saddam, including continuing the current containment policy with "smart sanctions", as well as regime change.

Mr Blair said that he consulted the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, and Ministry of Defence officials about the courses of action open to him. He also held a meeting at his country residence, Chequers, before flying to Texas.

Mr Blair sought to play down his comments in a BBC interview with Fern Britton in which he said he would have thought it right to remove Saddam, even if he had known that he did not have WMD.

"Even with all my experience in dealing with interviews, it still indicates that I have got something to learn about it," he said.

"I didn’t use the words ’regime change’ in that interview and I didn’t mean in any sense to change the basis. Obviously, all I was saying was you cannot describe the nature of the threat in the same way if we knew then what we know now.

"It was in no sense a change of position. The position was that it was the approach of UN resolutions on WMD. That was the case. It was then and it remains."

It was during early 2002 that Mr Blair persuaded Mr Bush of the need to try to resolve the stand-off diplomatically, via the United Nations. It was on the basis of a subsequent Security Council Resolution, 1441, adopted in November that year, that the Attorney-General gave a green light to UK participation in the conflict.

Critics of the war say that the diplomatic manoeuvring was just an attempt to provide a legal fig leaf for the invasion, but Mr Blair insisted today that the Americans would have accepted a diplomatic solution if one had been forthcoming.

He said that on several occasions, "President Bush made it clear to me that if the UN route worked, then it worked: we would have had to take 'yes' for an answer".

But Mr Blair was clearly uncomfortable when he was later probed as to why, even as military planning picked up pace, his Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, was not asked to give a formal opinion on the legality of going to war. In the event, the Government's chief legal officer only gave a proper green light to the invasion two weeks before it began.

Mr Blair confirmed that he discussed "military options" with Mr Bush at Crawford, a year earlier. He said: "It was obviously a possibility that military action would be the outcome of what was going to happen. So there was a general discussion of the possibility of going down the military route, but obviously we were arguing very much for that to be if the UN route failed."

The former prime minister told the inquiry he supported military advice that Britain should deploy a large land force in support of any US invasion rather than opting for a smaller-scale option. He also confirmed that Mr Bush had told him, during the diplomatic stand-off at the UN, that Britain need not take part in the invasion but he had thought it should.

"If we think it’s right, we should be prepared to play our part fully," he said.

Mr Blair was asked if he felt in 2002 that the link between terrorism and Iraq’s supposed WMD was a potential threat to the UK.

He replied: "Yes, because for the reasons that I have given, if Saddam, freed from sanctions, was able to pursue WMD programmes, I was very sure that at some point we were going to be involved in the consequences of that."

He added: "This is a profoundly wicked, I would say almost psychopathic, man. We were obviously worried that after him his two sons seemed to be as bad, if not worse."

Mr Blair admitted that Britain did not accept any connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, but pointed to Iran’s alleged backing for insurgencies in the Middle East.

"There are very strong links between terrorist organisations and states that support or sponsor them," he said.

Questioned on the 45-minute claim — which really referred to battlefield munitions inside Iraq – Mr Blair said that it "would have been better to have corrected it" but he did not focus on it at the time.

"You weren't aware yourself that you were overstating the intelligence?," he was asked.

"Correct." he replied.

Jan. 29, 2010

VIEW VIDEO

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article7007886.ece