It would have been "right to remove" Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein even without evidence that he had weapons of mass destruction, Tony Blair has said.The former prime minister said it was the "notion of him as a threat to the region" which had tilted him in favour of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Without WMD claims it would have been necessary to "use and deploy different arguments," he told the BBC.
Mr Blair is expected to face the Iraq war inquiry early next year.
In September 2002 the UK government published a dossier which contained the now discredited claim that Iraq could use weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) within 45 minutes of Saddam's order.
'Incredibly difficult'
Former Joint Intelligence Committee chief Sir John Scarlett told the Iraq inquiry this week that there had been "absolutely no conscious intention to manipulate the language or to obfuscate or to create a misunderstanding as to what this might refer to".
Speaking on BBC One's Fern Britton Meets programme, Mr Blair was asked whether he would still have gone on with invasion plans had he known at the time that there were no WMDs.
He said: "I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat."
He added: "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons still in charge, but it's incredibly difficult and I totally understand...
"That's why I sympathise with the people who were against [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, you know, in the end I had to take the decision."
Asked whether it was the idea of Saddam having WMDs which had tilted him in favour of war, Mr Blair said it was "the notion of him as a threat to the region of which the development of WMDs was obviously one" aspect.
He added that there had been "12 years of United Nations to and fro on this subject" of Iraq's weapons and that Saddam had "used chemical weapons on his own people, so this was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind - the threat to the region".
Mr Blair was also asked what role his Christian faith played in the decision to go to war.
He said: "I think it is important that you take that decision, as it were, on the basis of what you think is right, because that is the only way to do it.
But he went on: "I think people sometimes think my religious faith played a direct part in some of those decisions, it really didn't."
Mr Blair is set to be the key witness to the Iraq inquiry, which is looking at the whole build-up to the war nd its conduct and aftermath.
