In a wide-ranging interview, he also said Iran and Syria could play a constructive role in the Middle East.

Blair stressed the importance of progress in the Middle East peace process, and also in winning the US-led "war on terror".

'Deliberate strategy'

Speaking on the Frost Over the World programme, Frost suggested that since the 2003 invasion of Iraq events there had been "pretty much of a disaster".

Read the full transcript of Blair's interview with David Frost here.

Blair replied: "It has, but you see what I say to people is why is it difficult in Iraq?

"It's not difficult because of some accident in planning, it's difficult because there's a deliberate strategy - al-Qaeda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the other - to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war."

A Downing Street spokesperson later said Blair's views had been misrepresented in the interview, and the UK leader had simply acknowledged the question when he agreed with Frost's suggestion.

"The prime minister does not use the word disaster," the spokesperson said.

"What he does is set out that the violence in Iraq is of course hugely regrettable, tragic and very difficult, but that this violence is a result of malicious external intervention, not some planning error three years ago."

Blair also called for greater involvement of Iran and Syria - once described by George Bush as the "axis of evil" - in resolving the Middle East impasse.

He said: "We have to go out there, ourselves and the Americans, and say we are not against you because we believe we should decide who governs Iran or we should decide who governs Syria.

"What we're saying to you is very clear ... If you are prepared to be part of the solution there is a partnership available to you, but at the moment ... you are behaving in such a way that makes a partnership impossible."

He rejected claims that talking to Iran and Syria amounted to "appeasement".

Blair insisted progress in the Middle East would send a signal that westerners and Christians were not in conflict with Muslims.

"It was a battle between all those who believe in tolerance, in living together in harmony, in a non sectarian future against those who want to divide us."

Blair also urged Iran and Syria to do more to curb the violence in Iraq but said that the two "have different interests in the region."

'Same page'

He said: "We have to go out there, ourselves and the Americans, and say we are not against you because we believe we should decide who governs Iran or we should decide who governs Syria.

"What we're saying to you is very clear ... If you are prepared to be part of the solution there is a partnership available to you, but at the moment ... you are behaving in such a way that makes a partnership impossible."

"[Iraq is] not difficult because of some accident in planning"

Tony Blair, British prime minister

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Blair has previously committed himself to bringing peace to the Middle East, but during the interview he did not immediately endorse a new peace proposal initiated by France and Spain.

"It's good to have everyone on the same page but its really about making sure that we make progress to the two-state solution," he said.

He said it was vital that the international community "manages to get into a situation where we are negotiating about the details of peace rather than looking at the appalling consequences of conflict".

The British prime minister has been in office for nine years and is expected to step down within months.

Blair's legacy

Blair has said that he wants a new peace deal in the Middle East to be his legacy and warned that the greatest challenge facing with world now was "religious extremism".

"The fundamental political difference is less to do with the traditional left-right politics ... it is whether countries are open, whether they are tolerant, whether they embrace people of different views and different faiths or whether they are closed societies," he said.

Marwan Qabalan, a political analyst from the University of Damascus in Syria, told Al Jazeera that Tony Blair's interview contained many contradictions and indicated that Britain and the US needed to decide on a common policy towards Syria and Iran.

He said: "It might be in the end that they [Britain and the US] have to decide if Syria and Iran are supporting the insurgency or whether Syria and Iran have real influence in Iraq, so that they can be getting involved in the political process to stabilise that country [Iraq]."

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

But Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam war who has advised President Bush about Iraq, warned against a rapid withdrawal of coalition troops, saying it could destabilize Iraq's neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict.

"A dramatic collapse of Iraq - whatever we think about how the situation was created - would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region," he said.

Kissinger, whose views have been sought by the Iraqi Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker III, called for an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Iraq's neighbors - including Iran - and regional powers like India and Pakistan to work out a way forward for the region.

"I think we have to redefine the course, but I don't think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal," he said.

Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture.

"There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic situation. . . . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."

The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N. Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the war.

Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president.

"People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.

"If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."

And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott (Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their faith entirely in Bush.

Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy."

Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said, "so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."

The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his administration.

The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W. Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L. Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government, culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.

On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.

Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle, Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that could be turned into an opportunity.

In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."

Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."

White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability.

Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said. "There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons should not get too angry at Bush about that."

It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself -- that Iraq could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy."

Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk."

But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

"The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said. All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the most incompetent" of the past half-century. But, he added, "Obviously, the president is ultimately responsible."

Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out, resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board.

"It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that turns bad, you do have some responsibility."

Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."

Taking the opposite tack, newly empowered Democrats pressed their case for a phased withdrawal of American forces. They hoped a blue-ribbon advisory panel would propose a way ahead for Iraq, while making clear the U.S. military mission shouldn't last indefinitely.

McCain, a front-running GOP presidential hopeful for 2008, said the U.S. must send an overwhelming number of troops to stabilize Iraq or face more attacks - in the region and possibly on American soil.

"I believe the consequences of failure are catastrophic," said McCain, R-Ariz. "It will spread to the region. You will see Iran more emboldened. Eventually, you could see Iran pose a greater threat to the state of Israel."

With about 141,000 U.S. troops in Iraq more than 3 1/2 years into the war, the American military has strained to provide enough forces while allowing for adequate rest and retraining between deployments.

But McCain, who spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war after his Navy plane was shot down in 1967, recalled the Vietnam War's lessons. "We left Vietnam. It was over. We just had to heal the wounds of war," he said. "We leave this place, chaos in the region, and they'll follow us home. So there's a great deal more at stake here in this conflict, in my view, a lot more."

McCain said he based his judgment partly on the writings of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida leader in Iraq who was killed in a U.S. air raid, and of Osama bin Laden.

"The consequences of failure are so severe that I will exhaust every possibility to try to fix this situation. Because it's not the end when American troops leave. The battleground shifts, and we'll be fighting them again," McCain said. "You read Zarqawi, and you read bin Laden. ... It's not just Iraq that they're interested in. It's the region, and then us."

Sen. Joseph Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he hoped a special commission considering options for the way ahead in Iraq would assert that U.S. troop commitments are not open-ended; propose a clear political road map for Iraq; and recommend engaging Iraq's neighbors in a political solution.

"We are past the point of adding more troops. We are past the point of vague policy prescriptions. It is not an answer just to stay. Nor is it an answer - though it may become a necessity - just to go with no concern for what follows," Biden, D-Del., wrote in Sunday's Washington Post.

"The fundamental question we must answer is whether, as we begin to leave Iraq, there are still concrete steps we can take to avoid leaving chaos behind," said Biden, who plans to run for president in 2008.

Democrats poised to take control of the House and Senate are pressing for a substantial reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq and a timetable for their withdrawal, as a way of forcing the Iraq government to rely more on itself.

"We must tell the Iraqis that we would begin, starting in four to six months, a phased reduction of our troops," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Because if you don't do that, they're going to continue to have the false assumption that we are there in some kind of an open-ended way. And it is that assumption on their part that takes them off the hook."

Incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., agreed. "As a practical matter, there are no troops to increase with," he said. "Our objective was to remove Saddam Hussein and create an environment in which a democracy could be established. That has been done."

But Hoyer said Democrats would continue funding the existing troop levels, for the time being.

"That's not an option, of not supporting our troops in the field and making sure they're as safe as we can make them," he said. "Very frankly, their lack of numbers exposes them on a daily basis to danger and death, unfortunately. But clearly, we're going to have discussions going forward as to how we change this policy and change it in the short term, not the long term."

Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week he believes troop levels should remain steady for now. He said it was possible to add 20,000 troops for a short time, but it would be unrealistic to raise troop levels as proposed by McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

Abizaid said the American military in Iraq is stretched too thin already, and sending over a bigger, more permanent presence would undercut efforts to force Iraqis to take on more responsibility.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said he thinks U.S. generals have been put "in a a very, very difficult position."

"What I don't have confidence in is the policy. And General Abizaid is giving us a diagnosis that is based on the current policy. But that policy has to change, and it can change," said Kerry, who is considering a White House bid in 2008.

Kerry spoke on "Fox News Sunday," while McCain and Hoyer appeared on ABC's "This Week." Levin spoke on CNN's "Late Edition." Graham appeared on "Face the Nation" on CBS.

Late on Sunday, Ammar Assafar another health ministry deputy was kidnapped when gunmen wearing police uniforms stormed his house in Baghdad's northern district of Adhamiyah.

Earlier in the day, the Iraqi minister of state, Mohammed Abbas Auraibi, survived a roadside bomb explosion targeted his convoy on a highway in eastern Baghdad, wounding two of his bodyguards.

Insurgents frequently attack Iraqi government senior officials along with Iraqi security forces, accusing them of collaborating with U.S. occupation.

The Food and Drug Administration said in a warning last December that giving Factor VII to patients who don't have the blood disorder could cause strokes and heart attacks. Its researchers published a study in January blaming 43 deaths on clots that developed after injections of Factor VII.

However, the Army medical command considers it a medical breakthrough that gives front-line physicians a way to control deadly bleeding. Physicians in Iraq have injected it into more than 1,000 patients, reported The Sun, which makes its first Sunday edition available Saturday afternoon.

"When it works, it's amazing," said Col. John B. Holcomb, an Army trauma surgeon and commander of the Army's Institute of Surgical Research. "It's one of the most useful new tools we have."

Critics strongly disagree.

"It's a completely irresponsible and inappropriate use of a very, very dangerous drug," said Dr. Jawed Fareed, director of the hemostasis and thrombosis research program at Loyola University in Chicago and a specialist in blood-clotting and blood-thinning medications.

Military doctors said patients requiring transfusions of 10 or more units of blood have a 25 percent to 50 percent chance of dying from their injuries, and there is enough evidence of the drug's effectiveness to continue promoting its use.

"I've seen it with my own eyes," said Air Force Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bailey, a trauma surgeon deployed this summer as senior physician at the American military hospital in Balad, Iraq. "Patients who are hemorrhaging to death, they get the drug and it stops. Factor VII saves their lives."

However, doctors at military hospitals in Germany and the United States have reported unusual and sometimes fatal blood clots in soldiers evacuated from Iraq, including unexplained strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms, or blood clots in the lungs. And some have begun to suspect Factor VII, The Sun reported.

Contacted Saturday by The Associated Press, an Army spokeswoman, Mary Ann Hodges, declined to comment immediately on the report because she had not seen it.

Doctors say determining the precise cause of blood clots is rarely possible, making it difficult to establish definitively whether Factor VII is responsible for complications. And military doctors caution against drawing any conclusions from individual cases.

Officials at Novo Nordisk said complications don't mean the drug is too dangerous to use.

"It's really not a question of an absolute safety level, but rather a ratio of benefit to risk that has to be established," said Dr. Michael Shalmi, vice president of biopharmaceuticals for Novo Nordisk.

"We're making decisions, in the middle of a war, with the best information we have available to us," said Holcomb at the Army's Institute of Surgical Research.