Blair 'troubled daily' by Iraq toll

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The former Prime Minister insisted he was not haunted by the decision. But he added: "I reflect on it, and am troubled by it, and feel a great sense of responsibility for it."

Mr Blair told The Times: "The most difficult thing in any set of circumstances is the sense of responsibility for people who have given their lives and fallen - the soldiers and the civilians.

"If I did not feel that, there really would be something wrong with me, and there is not a single day of my life when I do not reflect upon it... many times. And that's as it should be.

"On the other hand, you have to take the decision and I look at the Middle East now and I think, well, if Saddam and his two sons were still running Iraq how many other people would have died and would the region be more stable?"

In total there have been 4,551 coalition deaths - 178 of them British service personnel - as well as civilian casualties estimated at anywhere up to a million.

Mr Blair also hailed new US President Barack Obama as part of his "new generation" of political leaders who were focused on practicalities rather than ideology and partisanship.

"I think there is a new generation of political leaders who find the very traditional pigeonholing rather redundant, actually," he told the newspaper in an interview to be published on Saturday.

Lauding Mr Obama's "real political depth and imagination", he said: "The thing he does brilliantly is to explain why certain sentiments are inconsistent with the future and can be put to one side.

"Prejudice certainly, but also that he understands that very partisan politics doesn't really work any more and doesn't meet either the needs of the time or the mood of the time."