Iraq

So, finally the hunt for WMD is over. We will be officially told next week that there were no WMD. According to today’s Guardian:

“The comprehensive 15-month search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has concluded that the only chemical or biological agents that Saddam Hussein’s regime was working on before last year’s invasion were small quantities of poisons, most likely for use in assassinations.

A draft of the Iraq Survey Group’s final report circulating in Washington found no sign of the alleged illegal stockpiles that the US and Britain presented as the justification for going to war, nor did it find any evidence of efforts to reconstitute Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme.”

Secondly, there are strong indications that Blair was warned by the British Foreign Office of the likelihood of chaos following a military campaigh to oust Saddam.

And finally, we have discovered that Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, thinks that the war was illegal — and that he thought so all along. If this had been known in Britain at the time of the House of Commons debate about going to war, I’m absolutely certain that Blair would not have received the backing on Parliament for the adventure. So why the hell did Annan not speak out at the time? (We know the answer: the US would have withdrawn its financial support for the the UN.)