[BBKing]

"it is indeed the prime minister's unequivocal view that Iraq is in further material breach of its obligations".

I'm rapidly entering brain meltdown here, but doesn't Lord Goldsmith's advice (very strongly worded, incidentally) on the 7th say that it *isn't* the PM's role to decide whether Iraq was in breach. Even if his view was unequivocal, it still wasn't his job to decide. Yet ten days later it suddenly is his role and the war's legal because Tony says it's legal? This stinks of herrings somewhere.

The 'you'd have left Saddam in power' argument is the last throw of a very dirty dice. He was 66 years old, bluffing on no cards, wasn't in control of more than the middle slice of his country (remember the Kurds have had democracy for years under UN-mandated no-fly zones), didn't have an army worth the name and was desperate to avoid people seeing him as being as weak as he was (scared of Iran, scared of internal dissent). Quite why we needed to enhance his big bad boy image by pretending he was about to attack us all with non-existent weapons is beyond me - portraying him as he really was would have been quite damaging to his prestige.

We could have got him out without war (and without the sacrifice of, thankfully, not many lives on our side), but that would have left the country run by the Iraqis, the US without its airbases, its lucrative contracts for friends of George, its secure, pliant base in the middle of the Middle East and of course the undemocratic restructuring of the Iraqi economy along neo-liberal lines without so much as asking the people first. By the time the Iraqis get a representative government (next year, actually) the economy will effectively be out of their control and in the hands of the corporations, the rape will be complete. Fallujah will still be in ruins though. Still, hey ho, another day, another dollar.