He said the point of the calls was to ensure that in the wake of the Arab spring and the uprising in Libya he left the country, but Gaddafi continually insisted he was only attacking extremists. Blair told the committee that the pace of events meant in the end intervention was necessary.
He said the calls were intended to see if Gaddafi would leave voluntarily and if there could be a different type of transition.
He said his actions were informed by his experience of Afghanistan and Iraq. “The problem is you can remove the dictatorship – Taliban or Saddam – but afterwards all those forces that have been suppressed come to the surface and then you get external actors who try to destabilise the situation. Because of that experience, I thought right from the outset of the Arab spring, if you could get a peaceful evolution that is better than a revolution because the revolution produces the chaos.”
Blair denied that his decision to broker new relations with Libya meant he had backtracked on