Does "Bush's poodle" Blair regret sending British troops to Iraq?

Not according to this Washington Post report:

Since he took office in May 1997, Blair has argued that military intervention in sovereign nations is justified to stop atrocities. And long before Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, Blair repeatedly identified Saddam Hussein as a serial human rights violator and threat to the world.

At the same time, those who know Blair well said he believes that Britain is best served by a prime minister who keeps an airtight relationship with the U.S. president and stays "inside the tent" with him to influence policy.

. . .Those core beliefs led Blair to stand by Bush when other world leaders distanced themselves.

"He believed Saddam was bad, and he didn't want the United States to be left to go it alone," Peter Riddell, author of three books about Blair is quoted as saying. "He wasn't being a poodle, it was an embrace."

As the Post reports Blair himself saying:

"I think if you left Saddam there you would have a whole stack of different problems," he said in an interview last fall with The Washington Post. "And in the end, you'd have had to have dealt with Iraq at some point."

As prime minister, Blair first publicly mentioned Saddam Hussein in November 1997, barely six months after he took office. He told a London audience that Hussein was again defying U.N. weapons inspectors, and he warned the Iraqi leader not to underestimate international resolve: "He has made this fatal miscalculation before. For his sake, I hope he will not make it again."

In the same speech, Blair gave a rousing call to hug the Americans close."Leaving all sentiment aside, they are a force for good in the world," Blair said. "They can always be relied on when the chips are down. The same should always be true of Britain."

That was back in 1997, long before his "master George" became president of the United States. As the Post reminds readers:

The next year, in December 1998, Blair made good on his threats against Hussein, using military force for the first time in Operation Desert Fox, a joint U.S.-British missile and bomb assault that targeted presidential palaces, Baath Party headquarters, intelligence and military posts, and potential missile factories.

In 1999, Blair gave a speech about Slobodan Milosevic and his ethnic cleansing campaign against Muslims in Kosovo. In this speech, as the Post reports, Blair said that in today's "increasingly interdependent world, acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. If we can establish and spreadthe values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society, then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer."

As the Post went on:

While he was speaking specifically about Milosevic, he also mentioned Hussein, calling them "two dangerous and ruthless men" who had waged "vicious campaigns" that had "brought calamity on their own peoples."

Then in 2003, when over a million Britons took to the streets in protest of the impending Iraq invasion, as the Post reports:

In a speech the day of the march, Blair said that he did not "seek unpopularity as a badge of honor" but that "sometimes it is the price of leadership and the cost of conviction."

As to how he could remain firmly on the side of President Bush in the face of all the criticism he has received both at home and abroad, Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to the U.S. from 1997 to 2003, had this to say: "Blair seems to have bought into this notion that it would all turn out all right," Meyer was quoted as saying. "I think he's swept up by great ideas, broad ideas, messianic ideas and a sense of mission -- maybe infused by religious belief."