London, January 30: Former British prime minister Tony Blair told a public inquiry into the Iraq war on Friday he had no regrets about removing Saddam Hussein from power.
Asked by the inquiry chairman if he had any regrets, Blair said: “Responsibility but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein.”
Blair’s comments were greeted with shouts of “liar” and “you’re a murderer” from the public gallery, where relatives of some of the 179 British soldiers killed in the war were watching his evidence.
After the chairman demanded quiet, Blair continued: “I think that he was a monster, I believe he threatened not just the region but the world.
“And in the circumstances that we faced then, but I think even if you look back now, it was better to deal with this threat, to deal with it to remove him from office. And I do genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result.”
The statement came at the end of a day-long session of evidence, in which he set out his reasons for taking Britain into the US-led war against Iraq in 2003.
Earlier, the inquiry panel had questioned Blair about the civilian death toll in Iraq since the invasion, which the former premier put at about 100,000, citing non-governmental organisations.
“The coalition forces weren’t the ones doing the killing,” he replied.
“The ones doing the killing were the terrorists, the sectarians, and they were doing it quite deliberately to stop us making the progress we were trying to make.”
-Agencies