The prime minister has again defended the government's handling of intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

At his monthly press conference, Tony Blair said there was no attempt to deceive the country with the September dossier.

"I don't accept that people were misled, because I think if you read the Joint Intelligence Committee assessment, their judgments are absolutely clear," he said.

"If you go back through and read those assessments, I defy anybody to say, if you are the prime minister receiving those assessments, you wouldn't have made the conclusions that I made."

Under close questioning from journalists, the prime minister told reporters that assessments from the JIC proved that "Saddam was a WMD threat".

He denied that the lack of clarity in the dossier about the drawbacks of intelligence meant the government had been less than honest about the case for war.

"The caveats were simply saying...the intelligence is limited," he said.

Blair added that it was "very rare" for a pattern of intelligence to be wrong.

"It's important people don't lurch from one extreme right over to the other and say, actually the evidence shows he wasn't a threat at all, because that's not true," he argued.

Iraq

The prime minister said the handover of power to a sovereign interim Iraqi government meant that the country "can take a real step towards democracy".

He also insisted that the decision to go to war was correct.

Not going to war "would have left Iraq an unsafe, unsecure country that did pose a threat...to the region and the world".

Turning Iraq into a stable and democratic country would have a "huge impact", Blair added.