The inspectors last time did a pretty good job, considering they were up against the blocking efforts of the Iraqi government in the one hand, and, on the other hand, the largely successful effort by the US government to use the inspection process as a spying operation.(That isn't even a controversial claim which anybody bothers to even deny.) Even so they achieved a lot.

No doubt Saddam is going to wriggle and twist, but there's good reason to think they'll be at least as effective this time, and probably more so. If they are allowed in by Washington in the first place. Yes, and maybe all the huffing and puffing by Bush and Co is just a bluff by the USA aimed at getting Saddam to stop playing silly buggers about inspection. We're on then outside playing guessing games based on very limited information..

As for the Churchillian parallels - well, Churchill was all in favour of using poison gas against the Kurds, which the British government did when it was firming up its control of what was then Mesopotamia, so that's one thing in common. The parallel shouldn't be stretched too far - the numbers killed were smaller, and maybe there's a difference between gassing people in a foreign country and gassing rebellious citizens in your own country. Maybe.P>

And Britain was a consistently expansionist imperial power when the opportunity was there. But by the summer of 1940 it was very much the weaker party in the fight with Germany.

It's also worth remembering that Saddam's record as an expansionist has been disastrously unsuccessful. Even his war against Iran was only carried out when he had the green light from Washington, and without American help it would have been even more disastrous from his point of view. As for Kuwait, this seems to have been a case of Saddam misreading the signals, and launching the occupation under the impression the USA had given him the nod.