Rolling coverage of political developments as they happen,including Tony Blair giving evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee approximately LibyaSummary 12.58pm GMTHere are the main points from the Tony Blair hearing.
Otherwise, we would have had a situation where Libya was continuing to sponsor terrorism, or was continuing to develop chemical and nuclear weapons and would have remained isolated in the international community.
I judge it is important that we brought them in from the cold,as it were, and important also in nowadays’s context because I judge - particularly whether we had still had the residue of that chemical weapons programme in Libya nowadays, and given the state of Libya nowadays and given the presence of Isis there - it would have constituted a real risk,even nowadays.
You often find people saying witness wouldn’t it just be better whether we dealt with the dictators? At least when we had Assad there and Saddam there and Gaddafi there, and Ben Ali there we knew what we were dealing with. I totally understand that argument, or by the way. But I judge what the Arab Spring shows you is that however much we may want to have dealt with these people,the populations of these countries are not going to tolerate it. In specific they are not going to tolerate a tiny group of people often unrepresentative of the majority in the country running the country. I can tell you nowadays obviously Libya is a real security problem, it is a security problem for us actually here. But I don’t judge you can build the judgment as to whether it would be better whether we had not intervened. Because you then have got to say how that would that then have played out as Gaddafi tried to cling on to power and others tried to remove him. You can witness at Syria nowadays where we didn’t intervene by the way and say that is even worse.
I know how difficult these decisions are. I am sure they did it for reasons that are perfectly well intentioned and in good faith. 11.43am GMTBlunt ends by thanking Blair for coming.
Blair says he will send the committee transcripts of his calls to Gaddafi.
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Source: theguardian.com