Blair hints he would have invaded Iraq even without discredited WMD threat

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Tony Blair’s justification for invading Iraq will come under intensely renewed scrutiny this weekend, after the Guardian today published the important headline Blair: I would have invaded Iraq anyway.

Speaking in an interview with Fern Britton for the BBC, to be broadcast tomorrow, Blair was asked “If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?”

His response is revealing, and will add more certainty to the long suspected notion: that Blair sought the war on numerous grounds, including grounds other than those on which the invasion was justified to Parliament and the British public at the time:

“I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean 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 in charge, but it’s incredibly difficult. That’s why I sympathise with the people who were against [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision.”

The threat of Saddam Husein using chemical weapons in the region was, according to the interview, at the fore of Blair’s mind in his rationale for invasion:

“This was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind. The threat to the region. Also the fact of how that region was going to change and how in the end it was going to evolve as a region and whilst he was there, I thought and actually still think, it would have been very difficult to have changed it in the right way.”

Tony Blair will appear at the Chilcot Inquiry in the new year.