Blair, who is to appear before a long-awaited official Iraq war inquiry early next year, said London would have used other ways to justify its support for the 2003 US-led war to oust the Iraqi leader.

"I would still have thought it right to remove him. Obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat," he told the BBC.

"I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons still in charge but it's incredibly difficult," he added, according to comments released before the programme was broadcast on Sunday.

Blair said: "It was the notion of him as a threat to the region, of which the development of WMD was obviously one, and because you'd had 12 years of United Nations to and fro on this subject, he used chemical weapons on his own people -- so this was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind."

Blair, who controversially backed then US president George W. Bush in the March 2003 invasion, accepted that families of soldiers who died in Iraq blamed him, but said they could be proud of their sacrifice.

"You know there are parents who feel very, very, deeply angry and resentful and believe that the war was not worth it," he said.

But he added: "It's also important to understand that many of those who are in the armed forces... they are very often proud of what their child has done and proud of the cause they fought in, so you've got to be."

The former head of Britain's centre-left Liberal Democrats party, Menzies Campbell, said Saturday that parliament would unlikely have backed the war if lawmakers knew there were no WMD in Iraq.

"He (Blair) would not have obtained the endorsement of the House of Commons on March 18, 2003 if he had been as frank with the House of Commons then as he appears to be willing to be frank with the BBC now," Campbell said.

Campaigners Stop the War Coalition said Blair's comments were "an admission of war crimes", adding: "It is an illegal act of aggression under international law to attack another country for the purposes of regime change."

Blair is expected to appear before the so-called Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war -- which opened last month, after almost all British forces left the country this year -- early in 2010, possibly in January.

In the BBC interview, the former premier also stressed the importance of his Christian faith and explained why he did not convert to Catholicism until after he left office in 2007.

"There would have been endless hassle," he said.

"Maybe I should just have done it but, to be frank, you have got so much going on as prime minister and there are so many issues you are having to deal with, that you really wonder whether it's a great idea to put the whole Catholic versus the established church (Church of England) thing into it.

"I had enough controversy to deal with."

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