>>>(The two reports he referring to here are the UNSCOM Reports that detailed the "unaccounted" items that formed the intelligence for the WMD that Iraq was suspected of holding on to - the items listed were not made up by George W Bush or by Tony Blair - here Blix is saying that UNSCOM reporting of those "unresolved" issues was justified<<

Right. There were questions of what Iraq could still have left. That was why inspections were necessary. According to Ritter, Iraqis were very compliant except in certain areas for security reasons. He explains it carefully--read the link.

>>- But wait a minute Scott Ritter's contention is that Iraq had no WMD or prohibited items in 1995, these reports were dated 1999, so which one of these tossers is lying, or was Ritter just hard at work selling a book)<<

Well, then, you didn't read it closely. Ritter said that no one could say for certain if Iraq had fully disarmed but that 90-95% of Iraq's weapons were dismantled or destroyed. There was still a 5-10% not accounted for. That's what the UN inspectors wanted to check on. Ritter said there was no capacity for large WMD caches in Iraq after the inspections. But there could still be some nasty weapons still around. That was what the inspectors were trying to find out.

What rankled Bush about the inspections was that they were conducted from the outset as already discounting that Iraq had a large number of WMD and were only looking for whatever might still be left around--it wouldn't be much but it might still be pretty lethal. So the UN wasn't taking Bush's assertions seriously--they already knew what Iraq's weapons capacity was and they knew it wasn't anything like what Bush was pushing. So Bush didn't much care for the inspections anyway. There was no chance their findings would support him and he knew it. If he allowed the inspectors to finish, the conclusion would be that Iraq was not rearming and had no viable WMD systems and his international support would have dwindled to nothing pretty quickly. So he did the only thing he could do if he wanted to get his invasion going--invade before the inspectors could finish. And that's what happened. The whole thing was driven, as usual, by politics and politics only.