>And of course you'd be bombing yourselves too. Today's events force the question: why did we impose 12 years of starvation, misery and neglect on the Iraqi people unless we believed that SH would do as we say while we did nothing about it.

Because we were fools. And fools who could not, in a unified way, determine a better way of doing it.

But NOT unprincipled fools. It was believed that the sanctions would weaken the Baath regime, perhaps even to the point where they would be overthrown. In my opinion, we should have realised that the sanctions were not working a long time ago. It was a belief that has been proven wrong. Perhaps we could have targetted the sanctions better and earlier - if we had seriously gone only after supplies that could have been used for military purposes, the misery of Iraqi civilians' would have been lessened, the local sympathies for Iraq would have been lessened, the antipathy towards the sanction imposers would have been lessened and hence the sanction busting would also have been lessened.

The sanctions as implemented failed the Iraqi people and they failed the rest of the world's efforts to destabilise Saddam Hussein.