- guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 January 2010 19.52 GMT
Tony Blair ended an epic six-hour inquisition by the Chilcot inquiry last night by insisting he had "no regrets" over toppling Saddam Hussein, arguing that the world was more secure and that Iraq has replaced "the certainty of suppression" with "the uncertainty of democratic politics".
The former prime minister blamed "the very near failure of the Iraqi occupation" on Iranian interference, misplaced assumptions and a lack of US troops.
During the long-awaited cross-examination, he gave no substantial ground over why he sent 40,000 UK troops to war to disarm Saddam of weapons he did not possess, arguing that if the west had backed off Saddam would have reassembled them, as he had the intent and ability to do so. "I had to take this decision as prime minister. It was a huge responsibility then and there is not a single day that passes by that I do not think about that responsibility, and so I should," Blair said.
Faced with the charge that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had lost their lives owing to cavalier planning, he said: "I genuinely believe that if we had left Saddam in power, even with what we know now, we would still have had to deal with him in circumstances when the threat was worse, and possibly when it was hard to mobilise any support for dealing with that threat.
"In the end, it was divisive, and I am sorry about that, and I did my level best to try to bring people back together again."
Asked in the final minute if he had regrets, he replied without reference to the families of dead British soldiers present: "Responsibility – but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein. I think he was a monster." He left the room to shouts of "you are a liar and a murderer".
During the day Blair seemed easily able to handle the five-strong inquiry team, but he was forced to concede in the late afternoon to many failures in British post-war planning, and fundamental disagreements with the US over strategy. He also tried to minimise the intelligence community's mistaken assessment in 2002 that Saddam was a growing threat by insisting Saddam did have the capability and intent to produce weapons of mass destruction, and would have reconstituted that capability if the international community had not enforced UN resolutions in 2003 by removing him from power.
In his newest argument in defence of the war, he said: "Don't ask the March 2003 question, but ask the 2010 question. Suppose we backed off. What we now know is that he retained absolutely the intent and intellectual know-how to restart a nuclear and chemical weapons programme when weapons inspectors were out and the sanctions were changed."
Blair said he also believed that Iran, a country "linked up with terrorist groups", posed a particularly dangerous threat. He referred to intelligence on Saddam's plans to acquire nuclear weapons. He added: "We face the same problem about Iran today." Saddam would have been emboldened, backed by oil at $100 a barrel, he said. He told the inquiry: "This isn't about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It's a decision. And the decision I had to take was could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programmes or is that a risk that it would be irresponsible to take?"
He insisted he did not enter a secret pact with George Bush in spring 2002 to commit the UK to regime change in Iraq. He said his objective throughout had been to disarm Saddam of weapons of mass destruction through diplomacy but backed by force.
Asked why he appeared to have endorsed regime change explicitly in a BBC interview with Fern Britton, he said he had not answered as he wanted. "Even with all my experience of dealing with interview it still indicates that I've got something to learn," he said in a rare moment of levity.
He admitted to a series of errors in the occupation. Britain had planned for a non-existent humanitarian disaster after the invasion, he said, but had not foreseen that the Iraqi state could not function.
He said he had been "shocked and angered" by US torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, had protested to the White House when US troops "went in too hard in Falluja" in 2004, and had to be "very strong" with the US over chaos in the initial reconstruction organisation.
He admitted: "If we had known what we know now, we would have done things very differently. People didn't think that al-Qaida and Iran would play the role that they did. It was really the external elements of al-Qaida and Iran that really caused this mission very nearly to fail."
He said the actual threat posed by Saddam did not change after the 9/11 attack in New York, but talked of "the calculus of risk". It became clear terrorists were willing to kill not just 3,000 but 30,000 if they could, Blair said.
But he repeatedly denied giving private assurances to send British troops into battle to remove Saddam regardless. "The only commitment I gave was to deal with Saddam. That was not a covert position, but a public position. I was not dissembling."