The puzzle with Saddam was, if he didn't have the wepons he was said to have had, why wasn't he fully cooperative with the inspection requirements from the start, instead of dragging his feet?

And the answer that makes sense to me was that so long as he was believed still to have stocks of poison gas, that was a major factor in holding down those Iraqis who didn't like him. After all he had shown he was willing to use it against Iraqis. If, through the inspection process, it had been demonstrated that he didn't have them, there would have been a real possibility of his being overthrown.

If liberation for Iraq had really been the objective, that would have been a more promising way of it being achieved, especially with a massive military presence on the Iraq borders, as a kind of guarantee aginst there being some of those WMDs after all. It would have been easy enough to extend the "no-fly zone " to cover the whole of Iraq in the event of an uprising, which would have transformed the situation.

But, as in 1992, when a previous Bush sat on his hands while the poeople he had urged to rise against Saddam were butchered, largely from the air, an Iraq freed by its own people was not what was wanted. Such an Iraq would not have been the kind of puppet regime that was wanted. It might even decide that on balance it had more in common with Iran than with America.