The change of administrations in Washington
and 9/11 broke the charade of UN resolutions
and Saddam’s non-compliance. Intelligence
sources were receiving reports that he was devel-
oping and hiding weapons of mass destruction.
Without inspectors now for three years no one
could be sure what was going on. The nightmare
scenario was that when ready he would be able
to threaten the West with his missiles and biolog-
ical and chemical weapons or pass them on to a
group of terrorists, even al-Qaeda. In January
2002 Bush warned that the US would not simply
wait to be attacked but would strike first. He
singled out Iran, Iraq and North Korea, ‘States
like these, and their terrorist allies constitute an
axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the
world’; containment was no longer enough while
weapons of mass destruction were believed to be
readied for use. The countdown for the removal of
Saddam Hussein, ‘regime change’, had begun.
A reluctant Bush was persuaded by Powell and
Blair, who flew to meet Bush at Camp David in
September 2002, to follow the UN route and put
maximum international pressure on Saddam to
disarm. Bush was sceptical whether Saddam would
give way but on 12 September 2002, for the sake
of broad support internationally and at home he
went before the UN and delivered a powerful
speech – the UN must ensure compliance with its
resolutions or would be condemned to irrele-
vance. Saddam appeared to give way permitting
the return of UN inspectors without conditions.
Then on 8 November 2002, the Security Council
passed Resolution 1441 threatening ‘serious con-
sequences’ if Saddam was found to be ‘in material
breach’ of the commitment to disarm, with a
timetable set for disclosing fully all his chemical
and biological weapons and programme on
acquiring nuclear capacity, or evidence that they
had been destroyed. The resolution was not as
tough as it sounded. It set a date for disclosure but
no final date for the destruction of such weapons
if they existed; it set no date either for a final
report by the UN weapons inspectors, imposing
no time limit on their search. Above all, ‘serious
consequences’ was not the same as automatic war
and who would decide what constituted a suffi-
cient ‘material breach’? It was not clear whether a
second UN resolution would be required before
Iraq could be attacked. Only with the help of such
fudges was the Security Council’s unanimous
approval of Resolution 1441 passed. On 27 No-
vember 2002 an advance party of the inspectors
arrived and, as required, Saddam handed them a
voluminous report in December purporting to be
a full disclosure of the forbidden weapons which
they claimed to have destroyed. The inspectors
found little except some missiles with a range
slightly over what was allowed. Their reports
to the UN in January and February 2003 were
ambiguous; Hans Blix the chief UN weapons
inspector asked for more time adding that Iraqi
cooperation was improving and that the offending
missiles were being destroyed. Saddam claimed to
have no weapons of mass destruction but Bush
and Blair were convinced he was lying. They were
relying on secret intelligence reports, which have
turned out to be unreliable when not totally
wrong. Much of the information or misinforma-
tion was fed to Washington by Iraqi defectors.
Meanwhile, the build-up of US and British
troops continued until early March; 250,000
were stationed mainly in Kuwait with a division
at sea waiting to enter in the north through
Turkey. The onset of extreme heat and the need
to not keep the troops waiting too long had set
a military timetable to strike before April 2003.
But internationally the conditions for the two
allies were far less favourable than at the time of
the first Gulf War when Saddam’s invasion of
Kuwait placed him in clear breach of UN oblig-
ations and international law.
In Europe the majority of public opinion was
against war. In Britain public approval was linked
to securing a second resolution from the UN
authorising war. Already the previous summer
Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s chancellor had
electrified his election campaign declaring
Germany would not participate in a war. Despite
bad economic conditions at home it swung a
wafer thin majority in his favour at the cost of
breaching good relations with the US. In France,
President Chirac was acclaimed for ‘standing up’
to the US and insisting that the UN could not be
bypassed. Turkey, America’s staunchest ally, had
elected an Islamic government in the autumn of
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