London, Dec. 12 (ANI): Tony Blair has justified the 2002 Iraq invasion by saying that it would have been right to invade Iraq even if it was known that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

Blair, who is due to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war, said that threat posed by Saddam to the wider region made the military action important in 2003.

“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,” Sky News quoted Blair, as saying.

“I can’t really think we’d be better with him and his two sons still in charge but it’s incredibly difficult. I sympathise with the people who were against it for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end, I had to take the decision,” he added.

In an interview with BBC1, Blair acknowledges criticism of the Iraq War but argued that the invasion was justified.

“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 uppermost in my mind,” he said.

While accepting that many blame him for dragging Britain in the worthless Iraq war, Blair said that parents of many soldiers who lost their lives in Iraq are proud of what their children have done.

“It’s also important to understand that many of those who are in the armed forces, including those who have lost their loved ones in Afghanistan or in Iraq, they are very often proud of what their child has done and proud of the cause they fought in, so you’ve got to be. (ANI)