Blair defends Iraq war, even without mass destruction weapons

Britain would have backed the invasion of Iraq even if it had been known that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), former British premier Tony Blair said today.

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 the BBC.

"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 programme was broadcast.

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."

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.