Tony Blair was hauled up in front of the sparsely-attended Foreign Affairs select committee today for a grilling about his links to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi — particularly around the time of the 2011 uprising. The former prime minister said he met with Gaddafi ‘once or twice’ because ‘it was important to bring them in from the cold’. If Britain hadn’t engaged with the regime, Blair said it would be ‘continuing to sponsor terrorism, was continuing to develop chemical and nuclear weapons and would have remained isolated in the international community’.
Blair mentioned that he currently visits the Middle East once or twice a month and his philosophy is that ‘evolution is better than revolution’ — but it would not have been better to keep Gaddafi in power: ‘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’.
There was much discussion of the phone calls Blair made to Gaddafi at the time of the West’s military action four years ago.
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