Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Friday he did not regret going into war with Iraq, calling former Iraq leader Saddam Hussein “a monster”.  In a six hour grilling by the UK Iraq Inquiry, Mr Blair said he "would do it again".

Listen to a Newsline interview with London correspondent Olly Barrat:

The inquiry, led by Sir John Chilcot, has already questioned many political leaders who were in office during the first years of the Iraq war. Tony Blair, who ultimately decided to go to war, did not appear before the commission until Friday, when he spent hours defending the decisions he took in 2003.

Protestors
He was greeted by a several hundred protestors outside the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in London where the inquiry is being held, calling him "Bliar" and a traitor. Inside, however, Mr Blair, when asked about the choices he made, proved as defiant as ever.

"It's not about a lie, or a conspiracy, or a deceit or a deception", he told the inquiry. "It's a decision. And the decision I had to take was: could we take the risk of this man [Saddam Hussein] reconstituting his weapons programmes?".

Promise to the US?
Mr Blair denied that he had promised US President George W. Bush as early as 2002 to join the Americans in a war with Iraq. "I was saying that we were going to be with the Americans in confronting and dealing with this threat. I think [Mr Bush] took from that exactly what he should have taken, which was: if it came to military action, we would be with him", Mr Blair said.

His Labour government went ahead with the war a year later, even when President Bush had offered Mr Blair a "way out" of the possible war, saying that he would understand if going to war would be "too difficult for Britain". But Mr Blair said on Friday that "it was right for us to be with America, since we believed in this, too".

WMD's
When entering the war in 2003, Mr Blair stated in British parliament that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD's) that could reach Europe within 45 minutes. These claims were later proven groundless.

Mr Blair now thinks this claim received "a vastly greater significance" than it deserved. "It would have been better if [these claims] had been corrected", he admitted.

He said the claim referred to battlefield munition not missiles. "Things obviously look quite different", Mr Blair admitted, referring to reports that Iraq's WMD's never really posed a serious threat.

UN resolution
Asked whether the UK/US-war in Iraq complied with UN regulations, Mr Blair said that this had been “preferable”, although President Bush had said that the UN Security Council's support "was not necessary". Mr Blair also said that UN resolution 1441, which stated that Saddam was in breach of UN regulations, did allow military action.
 

The Security Council, however, failed to adopt a resolution authorising military action against Iraq. "It was clear that there was a division in the Security Council and it was clear that [France, Germany and Russia] weren't going to agree that force should be used. I don't think it would have mattered how much time we had taken".

'2010'-question
Mr Blair repeatedly pointed out that the situation in Iraq and the Middle East could have been much different now if Saddam Hussein had not been removed from power.  "Sometimes it's important not to ask the 'March 2003'-question, but the '2010'-question", he said, adding that if Saddam had not been removed "Iraq and Iran would be competing in terms of nuclear capability and support of terrorist groups".

He also stressed that Saddam Hussein's regime was "brutal and oppressive" and "a menace to the Middle East peace process".