You must remember that by the time the bombing started, Saddam had had plenty of months to move, conceal and redeploy his weapons of mass destruction capability. So when the inspectors came after the war, they found that a far higher proportion of that capability was intact than had been claimed at the time in the various press briefings.

Iraq is a large country in which to hide things. But the US has been monitoring the situation for seven years now, in support of the UNSCOM inspectors, so they have a fair idea where the major sites were.

The real question is that you’ve now had a 100 days since you’ve had any inspections at all, there may be little in those areas given this length of time to conceal.

We’re in the same sort of situation we were in before the Gulf War. We’ve given Saddam an enormous amount of time in which to conceal equipment, machinery, weapon systems. Today, we know where the sites were. But we can’t be sure that everything we thought was there is still there. And that’s a problem for precision bombing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were quite a few mosques around Baghdad packed full of weapons material in the assumption that they won’t be going for mosques. This is what happened last time round and it’s a pretty good assumption that he would go for similar sorts of devices.

And Saddam, he’ll be moving himself round the clock, knowing that he himself may well be a target of any proposed bombing.