A good summary by the Guardian

[pauln1964]

For those with views on the legality and necessity of the Iraqi Adventure (which I know is many of my friends here), I suggest a perusal of today's leaders in the Grauniad.

On the Hutton Enquiry
On the "immediate cause" - WMD

Comments

[xullrae.livejournal.com]

They're right of course, there should be (and probably won't be) an inquiry into the war. I don't think there are many people who still believe the lies about WMDs, clearly the whole conflict had an awful lot more to do with oil than anything else.

The one thing I'm interested in is why didn't SH allow the inspectors greater freedom - if he didn't have any WMDs then why not admit that? I don't think that the real reason could have been just to defy the US, as he must have realised he wouldn't be allowed to get away with it. Maybe he couldn't risk the rest of the Arab world discovering how little he actually had in the way of weapons? Makes you think what a difficult position he might have been in, his only real way out was to keep the farce going as long as possible in order to arrange his own escape.

Anyone got any interesting conspiracy theories about SH's motives?

[captainweasel.livejournal.com]

I'd say to save face - give them just enough to move while thwarting the rest - and to keep his position as a Military power. his army was big, but the Chemical/Bio threat made him stronger.
maybe he was waiting another big shift in world politics so he could switch sides? look at Libya currently...

[captainweasel.livejournal.com]

we do need a proper judicial enquiry into the war - Saddam Hussein was a bad man who shouldn't have been running a country, but our government has been frankly out of order and we need the reasons why.