"He has to be stopped," the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, told the Commons bluntly yesterday. Presenting a 55-page dossier on the case for action against Saddam Hussein, Mr Blair reminded MPs of the Iraqi leader's brutality to his own people.
"Read it all, and again I defy anyone to say that this cruel and sadistic dictator should be allowed any possibility of getting his hands on more chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons," he said, and warned that inaction would be seen by Saddam as encouragement. "At some point, in a future not too distant, the threat will turn into reality."
Saddam, Mr Blair said, "attaches great importance to possessing weapons of mass destruction (and) does not regard them only as weapons of last resort". Iraq has "military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against its own Shia population," he said, and "some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them." Moreover, he claimed, Iraq would be able to develop a nuclear weapon within five years by producing fissile material within Iraq and within one or two years if Saddam could obtain it from abroad.
The onus on Mr Blair is considerable. To justify pre-emptive military action against Iraq, an unanswerable case must be made - not only that it is in repeated breach of Security Council resolutions, is accumulating weapons of mass destruction, and is proposing to use them.
The first of such contentions is indisputable. On the second, Mr Blair has put a case to the jury of world opinion that is deeply troubling and broadly convincing. It is on the third that he has failed yet to convince.
Mr Blair told the Commons that the policy of containment has clearly failed. True. Iraq has flouted some 14 UN resolutions with impunity. But conventional deterrence, the other half of the old policy, has yet to be exposed as ineffective.
Parallels drawn by his Foreign Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, to the failure of the League of Nations in Abyssinia and the price of appeasing Hitler are over-stated. Even Churchill never urged military action against Germany before it invaded Czechoslovakia.
What Mr Blair has done is to produce evidence that justifies the insistence by the Security Council on the immediate return of UN inspectors to Iraq. Should their work be obstructed again, it will be Iraq itself which may provide Mr Blair with the last unanswerable strand of his case.