BBC Online :
The 2003 invasion of Iraq is not to blame for the violent insurgency now gripping the country, former UK prime minister Tony Blair has said.
Speaking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr, he said there would still be a “major problem” in the country even without the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
He insisted the current crisis was a “regional” issue that “affects us all”.
Critics have rejected the comments as “bizarre” with one accusing Mr Blair of “washing his hands of responsibility”.
“Even if you’d left Saddam in place in 2003, then when 2011 happened – and you had the Arab revolutions going through Tunisia and Libya and Yemen and Bahrain and Egypt and Syria – you would have still had a major problem in Iraq,” Mr Blair said.
“Indeed, you can see what happens when you leave the dictator in place, as has happened with Assad now. The problems don’t go away.
“So, one of the things I’m trying to say is – you know, we can rerun the debates about 2003 – and there are perfectly legitimate points on either side – but where we are now in 2014, we have to understand this is a regional problem, but it’s a problem that will affect us.”
Michael Stephens, an expert on Iraq and Syria for the Royal United Services Institute, said the Iraq War had “a lot to play – a part in this sort of fragmentation of Iraq”.
“I think Mr Blair is washing his hands of responsibility,” he said. “But at the same time, I do agree with him that we can’t just ignore this.
“We do have some kind of role to play in terms of trying to make sure that both Iraq and Syria do not fragment and just move on into sort of unending violence.”
Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the US from 1997 to 2003, said the handling of the campaign against Saddam Hussein was “perhaps the most significant reason” for the sectarian violence now gripping Iraq.
“We are reaping what we sowed in 2003. This is not hindsight. We knew in the run-up to war that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would seriously destabilise Iraq after 24 years of his iron rule,” he said in the Mail on Sunday.
Syria is three years into a civil war in which tens of thousands of people have died and millions more have been displaced.
In August last year, a chemical attack near the capital Damascus killed hundreds of people.
In the same month, UK MPs rejected the idea of air strikes against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government to deter the use of chemical weapons.
Writing on his website, the former prime minister warned that every time the UK puts off action, “the action we will be forced to take will be ultimately greater”.
He said the current violence in Iraq was the “predictable and malign effect” of inaction in Syria.
“We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that ‘we’ have caused this,” he wrote. “We haven’t.”
He said the takeover of Mosul by Sunni insurgents was planned across the Syrian border.
“Where the extremists are fighting, they have to be countered hard, with force,” Mr Blair said.
The Sunni insurgents, from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), regard Iraq’s Shia majority as “infidels”.
After taking Mosul late on Monday, and then Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, ISIS militants pressed south into the ethnically divided Diyala province.
