LONDON, June 18: Tony Blair on Monday strongly defended intervening in Iraq for the final time as British prime minister before parliament’s top scrutiny body.

In a robust farewell performance, Blair insisted that ordinary Muslims craved democracy, saying that Islamist terrorists rather than the West were their worst enemy.

He warned that the West would be making a “fundamental mistake” if it gave up defending democracy when threatened with terrorism and slapped down those blaming coalition failures for the sectarian unrest since the March 2003 US-led invasion to topple dictator Saddam Hussein.

And Blair, who steps down next week, admitted that he felt a heavy responsibility for the death toll in Iraq.

“It is so comforting to people to say there was an error made in the planning. Someone didn’t spot what was going to go on,” he told the House of Commons liaison committee, made up of all the chiefs the lower chamber’s scrutiny bodies.

“That is not what has created the problem. What has created the problem is that the people we are fighting have decided to give us a problem.

“What they have decided is that if they can hang on long enough in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, or anywhere else, then we will lose the will.”

He said that Islamist militants purporting that Muslims were being oppressed by the West had a “difficult argument to make” if Muslims were being given a free vote for the first time.

“If we end up saying that because these people are committing these acts of terrorism in Iraq or Afghanistan, that we shouldn’t have done the removal of Saddam or the removal of the Taliban, then we are making a fundamental mistake about our own future, about security, about the values we should be defending in the world.”

Blair stands down on June 27 after a decade in power, leaving a legacy clouded by his decision to support US President George W. Bush in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.—AFP