Er, what LAST CHANCE, beardedbruce? Oh, you mean resolution 1441? The one that US Ambassador Negroponte encouraged nations to vote for by giving a categorical assurance that it was not a trigger for war? (That would be why Kofi Annan, when pressed, gave a view shared by most international jurists around the world, including most in the UK, that the war was illegal.)

Maybe Saddam played awkward with the US to avoid loss of face on the home front. So what? He wasn't compromising the inspections, and Hans Blix and his team were strongly of the view that the inspections regime should have been given more time. (After all, "Iraq is as big as France" as we heard parroted endlessly while the survey group was at work.)

Maybe, beardedbruce, you just think that anyone who teases the Bush administration deserves to have his civilian population slaughtered in tens of thousands. Well I, for one, am delighted that Washington is now paying, in cash and loss of worldwide respect, for the mess it's created.