Tony Blair on the Leonard Lopate Show on Sept. 15, 2010

Tony Blair on Iraq: We Didn't Provoke Extremism

It's A Free Country | Sep 15, 2010

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair joined "The Leonard Lopate Show" on Wednesday to talk about his new memoir, "A Journey: My Political Life," his firsthand account of his years in office.

In this excerpt, he talks about his decision to go to war in Iraq. He acknowledges and takes responsibility for the intelligence failures leading up to the war, but he does not believe Iraq fed the war on Terror. "We didn’t provoke extremism. We got rid of Saddam in two months. The UN were in Iraq, but when the terrorists started to kill the UN people and then their own people, this is Muslim on Muslim violence," Blair said. "They weren’t doing it because we were provoking them. One of the reasons we’re finding it hard to defeat extremism is because we believe we caused it."

 

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