risk assessment

John Chilcot (civil servant): "The risks from Saddam Hussein were overstated."

James Healy: "Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, spent the next eight years bombing Iranian civilians and armies with chemical weapons, and notched up a death toll in Iran of a million people. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and killed an additional several hundred thousand people there. After failing to subjugate Kuwait, Saddam Hussein bombed the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq with chemical weapons to quell any possibility of an uprising against his rule. He also used chemical weapons on the Kurds of northern Iraq for similar reasons. Saddam Hussein's internal politicking resulted in the deaths of at least 400,000 people in Iraq, out of a total population of around 25 million at the time. Saddam Hussein was paying a twenty thousand dollar bounty to the families of anyone who committed suicide bombings or other atrocities against Israel. Saddam Hussein hosted the Ansar Al Islam branch of Al Qaeda in the Kurdish region of Iraq. There is substantial evidence in my view that Saddam Hussein had ongoing contacts with Al Qaeda. The arsenal of chemical weapons from which he bombed his own citizens the southern Marsh Arabs and yet more of his own citizens in Kurdistan northern Iraq, was never accounted for. There is in my assessment substantial evidence, (cf the evidence compiled by political commentator Kenneth Timmerman, along with statements by former Second in Command of the Iraqi airforce George Sada and Israeli General Moshe Ya'alon) that Saddam Hussein retained his chemical weapons until the eve of invasion before moving most of them out of the country with the assistance of Russian Spetznatz commando military personnel... John Chilcot, is an unelected civil servant who is adventurously and frivolously attempting to criminalise, by tendentious inuendo, our war time Prime Minister Tony Blair. John Chilcot's reasoning in suggesting that Prime Minister Tony Blair's decisive action in Iraq somehow caused Jihadism in Britain is likenable to suggesting that Winston Churchill's warnings about the Nazis in the 1930s led to the radicalisation of young Germans. Allowing Gordon Brown to commission John Chilcot's report in the first place is likenable to allowing Neville Chamberlain to commission a report into Churchill. John Chilcot is dangerously wrong about everything."