ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SKY NEWS

The transcript of the full interview on Murnaghan 10.00 to follow. 

ANNA JONES: Tony Blair says the insurgency in Iraq has not been caused by the decision to go to war with the country in 2003.  Speaking to Sky News for the first time since Islamist fighters seized control of a number of towns and cities in Iraq, the former Prime Minister responded to his criticism about his role in the joint British and American invasion by blaming lack of action by the West in Syria for the current crisis.

TONY BLAIR: Some people will say, well if we hadn’t removed Saddam in 2003 we wouldn’t have the problem today in Iraq and the reason I think that is profoundly mistaken is this, since 2011 there have been these Arab revolutions sweeping across the whole of the region – Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, next door to Iraq in Syria and we can see what would have happened if we had left Saddam there in 2003.  In Syria we have left Bashir Al-Assad in Syria, the result is that there have now in the last three years in Syria been virtually as many people killed as in the whole if Iraq, you now have nine million people displaced from Syria, you have chaos and instability being now pushed across the region.  A country like Jordan for example today has got almost a quarter of its population now Syrian refugees so my point is, you can carry on debating about whether it was right or wrong what we did in 2003 but whatever had been done, you were always going to have a problem of deep instability in the region and in Iraq. 

I understand entirely why people want to say stay out of it, it’s someone else’s fight, it’s got nothing to do with us but unfortunately the people we’re dealing with, they are going to pull us into this whether we like it or not.  Now that does not mean – and let me make this clear – I’m not suggesting we put ground troops in and we do a full scale invasion as we did in Iraq or Afghanistan, but I am saying we are going to have to take an active role in trying to shape events in Syria and Iraq and indeed across the region.