Former British prime minister Tony Blair has insisted he should not be defined by the Iraq war,
The war criminal said he would rather be judged instead by his government’s ‘immense amount of good things’.
Blair, who was in power from 1997 until 2007, talked about his time in office in a new documentary series for Channel 4
The Mail Online reports: Some 179 UK troops died in Operation Telic that began with a US-launched and UK-backed so-called ‘shock and awe’ onslaught in March 2003, running until May 2011.
Official figures from the Ministry of Defence show that another 3,598 members of the British armed forces were injured in Iraq.
In footage due to be screened in the second episode of the three-part series, on Wednesday, Sir Tony tells his interviewer: ‘You know, you asked me a lot about Iraq and everything.
‘But I always say to people – look, we did an immense amount of good things and this country, on the day I left in June 2007, was a strong, capable country.
‘And in my view, and I’m entitled to it, as people are entitled to their view, if we’d stuck with that strong centre-ground government and we hadn’t got into the mess we have got into as a country we would be in a much more powerful position today.’
Sir Tony, 72, also he was inspired by the 1993 film Schindler’s List to decide that he could not be a ‘bystander’ and owed ‘some responsibility to the bigger world’.
Supporters of Sir Tony’s New Labour administration point to achievements such as introducing the national minimum wage, trebling NHS funding and the Northern Irish peace process.