"...like a snake you cannot tell from looking at him whether he is simply shiny or covered in slime."

Salam Adil quotes Michael Portillo, former MP who has changed his mind about supporting the war in Iraq.

I backed the invasion because I thought the West needed to reassert its power after 10 years during which America had looked irresolute. It had made no effective response to a series of Al-Qaeda attacks that began with a truck bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993. After the decision by George Bush père not to march on Baghdad at the end of the Gulf war in 1991, Saddam provided another example of anti-American defiance that had gone dangerously unpunished.

His comment:

And there you have the reason he, and probably the majority of politicians who gave Bush and Blair the freedom to do what they liked, supported such a disastrous war. The West (or specifically Britain and America) were looking a little weak and the best way that they could come up with to reassert their god-given right to global hegemony was to bomb a defenseless country into the stone-age.

Ouch!