There are all kinds of horrible leaders around the world. There's a good moral case to be made for going after each of them. But who is supposed to decide that the cost in human suffering is worthwhile? When Putin decides that the truly horrible things been done by the rulers of some of the former Soviet republics justifies that he mounts some kind of Chechnya type invasion and occupation, will that be fine and dandy?

At the time when Saddam was actually engaged in genocide against the Kurds he was be supported and given money and arms. When he was slaughtering his opponents in the wake of the Kuwait war, the US and UK and their allies, with a massive army in arms, just sat back and tacitly encouraged this.

But when he was weakened and reduced to a situation where he was having to accept sizeable inspection teams, and in every way potentially vulnerable to pressure, a war was manufactured that has killed an estimated 10 thousand civilians and caused untold damage, and shows every sign of continuing into an armed struggle without foreseeable end.

I believe that a determined multilateral effort to force Saddam to back off from the Iraqi people could well have produced a situation in which they could have displaced him, in the same way as it had been possible without war to compel his regime to abandon its control over Iraqi Kurdistan.

It seems to me that concerns about Weapons of Mass Destruction were indeed not the primary reason for war. But neither, I believe, was the primary reason "achieving regime change" in Iraq.

For Bush waging a successful war against Saddam was itself its own primary reason, for a combination of domestic political reeasons, and a wish to show the world a lesson in American power. And for Blair the central motive was that Britain should stay on side with the most powerful country in the world, now in very dangerous hands, in the hope somehow of maintaining some kind of controlling influence on its actions.