“Of course, you can’t say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015” and the rise of ISIS, said Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom and one of the leaders, with George W. Bush, of the drive to forcibly oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq. “But it’s important also to realize, one, that the Arab Spring which began in 2011 would also have had its impact on Iraq today, and two, ISIS actually came to prominence from a base in Syria and not in Iraq.”

Blair was speaking to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview that aired Sunday, and while he apologized for the fact that “the intelligence we received was wrong” regarding Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, he maintained, as other decision-makers of that era (and their relatives) have, that removing Saddam was a good thing. “I find it hard to apologize for removing Saddam. I think, even from today in 2015, it is better that he’s not there than that he is there,” he said.

Saddam was a tyrant and an aggressor, but are Iraq and the region really better off without him? Consider just some of the consequences of the war that removed him.

The link between the Iraq War and the rise of ISIS has been well-established, though it is noteworthy to hear such an admission from one of the war’s architects. In his book Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, the Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick recounts how Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq—the group that became the Islamic State of Iraq, and then the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—traveled to Iraq from a base in Afghanistan and then built a terrorist network in the power vacuum created by Saddam’s fall and the U.S.-led purging of members of his Ba’ath party from the new Iraqi government. (It’s worth noting that, contrary to Blair’s claims, the origins of ISIS do in fact lie in Iraq, though the chaos created by the Syrian civil war helped it establish a base in that country as well.) Writes Warrick:

It was in this reordered Iraq that Zarqawi would find both freedom to maneuver and powerful allies willing and able to support his cause. Captains and sergeants who once served Saddam Hussein now enlisted in Zarqawi’s army, and some rose to leadership positions. Others offered safe houses, intelligence, cash, and weapons, including, investigators later concluded, the aerial munitions and artillery shells that provided the explosive force for Zarqawi’s biggest car bombs.

Many of the other consequences of Saddam’s removal, direct and indirect, are harder to trace. But the reordering of Iraq has contributed to the reordering of the region as a whole—in particular in its impact on the Syrian civil war, Iran’s influence, Kurdish nationalism, and sectarian politics in the Middle East.