The latest reason for invading Iraq being pushed by the Whitehouse is that it caused Libya to forsake it's nuclear programme.

But did it?

The Whitehouse has proven itself time and again to be liars, at the worst interpretation, and incompetent at the kindest of interpretations.

So let's look at the facts.

Five years ago, Britain resumed diplomatic relations with Libya.

Libya's economy was a wreck, screaming for relief from Western sanctions and in desperate need for outward investment.

Al'Qaeda had tried to kill the Libyan leader, and from around five years ago, Gadaffi started to provide as much intelligence as he could about Islamic extremists, whom he feared as much as the West.

Around two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, some Libya diplomats slipped into Britain and met with MI6.

They tabled an astonishing proposal.

Although much to-ing and fro-ing went on in the following two years, around March 2003 a deal seemed to be on the table.

Last December, the deal was formally announced:

'In short, it would end its clandestine nuclear, chemical and biological programmes and agree to 'verification inspections' by international adjudicators.

It was the culmination of two years of talking, horse trading and negotiations - a process that began a few weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. In October that year a group of Libyan diplomats slipped unnoticed into Britain, led by Libya's ambassador to Rome' (The Observer)

...Moreover Kousa's arrival in the UK in October 2001 would signal a seismic shift in relations between Libya and the outside world; not least in the effective 'recruitment' of Libyan intelligence for the war on terror. A dangerous enemy had come on side, and with him, as a pledge of the sought-after alliance, he was carrying a pile of documents, detailing the names of Islamist terrorists in Africa, Europe and the Middle East and details of the 'cells' into which they were organising ( the Observer)

Before a shot was fired in Iraq, Libya had already come onside to aid in the war against terrorism and revoke its own ambitions for WMDs.

Other observers point out that Gadaffi had made moves to make peace with the West as long ago as 1992.

It is claimed by the Whitehouse that Gadaffi was forced to the negotiating table by the invasion of Iraq, however:

'The Pentagon may well have intended the assault on Iraq to inspire fear in recalcitrant leaders that they might be next, but the consequence of that bloody, sapping occupation of Iraq and its domestic controversy is that the White House is less able to threaten anyone else. Gadaffi has probably never been under less threat of US military action that at the moment he formally abandoned his nuclear programme with the honest observation 'It cost too much money' (Robert Cook - ex UK defence Secretary)

The cost to Iraq was born out by the fact that despite pursuing a nuclear programme, it hadn't really gotten very far.

But what about the 4,000 uranium centrifuges handed over by Libya as part of the deal?

It turns out that they were not centrifuges themselves, but the casings for the centrifuges.

According to ISIS and the Interational Atomic Energy Agency, Libya would have taken many more years to learn how to make the complicated rotors and other sophisticated components that are required to make such centrifuges operable, with no guarantee of success.

'...George Bush has used the disarmament pledge by Libya, long classified as a terrorist state, to justify the 2003 war with Iraq, after the embarradding failure to find a single weapon of mass destruction there. If ISIS and the IAEA are correct, the administration has been behaving over Libya as it behaved over Iraq, overblowing a threat to prove the rightness of its cause' (Rupert Cornwall, the British Independant)

There is no doubt that the removal of a rogue state intent on seeking WMDs is beneficial to the whole world.

But the victory in Libya is a victory for diplomacy, and not bombs.

As the US government continues to reel with revalation after revalation over its incompetence, at last the American people are beginning to realise that they have been lied to, and the approval rating for Bush and his cohorts diminish.

yechydda,