A sceptic may be entitled to wonder why western intelligence has not yet produced stronger new evidence about the present location of Iraq's banned weapons.

But it takes a complete idiot to swallow Saddam Hussein's countervailing plea that he has none. Logic and a veritable mountain of circumstantial evidence, points the other way. If Mr Hussein has nothing to hide, why did he put up with economic sanctions, forfeiting billions instead of cooperating with the previous inspections regime in order to end them?

Iraq's systematic deception of the first lot of inspectors sent to disarm it after the Gulf War is a matter of record, not conjecture. Iraq placed so many obstacles in front of these inspectors that they withdrew in 1998. Now the Iraqis maintain that, having pushed the inspectors out, they voluntarily destroyed all the chemical and biological munitions they had worked so hard to conceal, and kept no record of how and when they had done so.

It is not o­nly the US who considers this account to be incredible. It is o­nly a week, remember, since Hans Blix the chief inspector himself, told the UN Security Council that Iraq even now had not genuinely accepted the UN's 12-year-old instruction to disarm, reiterated unanimously last November in Resolution 1441. Without Iraq's active cooperation, he said, the inspectors could not verify that it had disarmed by playing 'catch as catch can'. A country with Iraq's record deserves no presumption of innocence.