Halabja certainly happened and it was perpertrated by Saddam's regime. However during the period 92-97 UNSCOM acting quite often on American intelligence located and destroyed a significant amount of outlawed missiles and materials operating under UN Security council resolution 687 and others.
Hans Blix the American leader of the UNSCOM team reported back several times from 97 that they were chasing their tails following American Allegations, you can find some of his later comments here;
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/03/21/iraq.weapons/
There was very little possibility of anything being spirited away, because of the amount of surveillance being carried out in and over Iraq. To quantify that, if a civilian uses a satellite location system it will use mostly civilain satellites and the very odd open military satellite which will produce at best anywhere in the world an accuracy down to an acceptable error of about 12 metres. Using military equipment in Iraq would give you a guaranteed accuracy of less than 30 cm's. Thats because of the number of satellites based over the country.
Nothing could have moved over any border without the Americans knowing about it and they would have provided some evidence of suspicious movements by now. Also temperature changes in the region are quite significant in the storage and eventual degradation of any chemical weapons, what therefore have the Syrians done with them, you cant just bury them in the sand and hope they just disappear.
By 1998 Saddam did not have either the means to produce weapons grade radioactive material. or any sort of biological or chemical weapons systems or manyfacturing facilities. US and the UK leaders knew that prior to the invasion. The UNSCOM team were not expelled by Iraq as Bush claimed but advised to leave for their own safety, they were warned about a series of offensive air strikes about to be launched by the US and UK, they left the airstrikes went in under the guise of a punitive strike against Saddam for expelling UNSCOM. That was Operation Desert Fox, condemned by the UN afterwards as not being sanctioned.
Former Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter said at the time the US/UK were as bad as the Iraqi's for muddying the waters, given that he was the one expert forced onto UNSCOM at the request of the US government.
In June, 1999, Ritter responded to an interviewer, saying: "When you ask the question, 'Does Iraq possess militarily viable biological or chemical weapons?' the answer is no! It is a resounding NO. Can Iraq produce today chemical weapons on a meaningful scale? No! Can Iraq produce biological weapons on a meaningful scale? No! Ballistic missiles? No! It is 'no' across the board. So from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq has been disarmed. Iraq today possesses no meaningful weapons of mass destruction capability
In 2002, Scott Ritter stated that, as of 1998, 90–95% of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities, and long-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering such weapons, had been verified as destroyed. Technical 100% verification was not possible, said Ritter, not because Iraq still had any hidden weapons, but because Iraq had preemptively destroyed some stockpiles and claimed they had never existed
According to documents provided by former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, George W. Bush, ten days after taking office in January 2001, instructed his aides to look for a way to overthrow the Iraqi regime. A secret memo entitled "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq" was discussed in January and February 2001, and a Pentagon document dated March 5, 2001, and entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts", included a map of potential areas for petroleum exploration
Prior to the Gulf War, in 1990, Iraq had stockpiled 550 tons of yellowcake uranium at the Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 20 kilometres (12 mi) south of Baghdad In late February 2002, the CIA sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to investigate reports (later found to be forgeries) that Iraq was attempting to purchase additional yellowcake from Niger. Wilson returned and informed the CIA that reports of yellowcake sales to Iraq were "unequivocally wrong." The Bush administration, however, continued to allege Iraq's attempts to obtain additional yellowcake were a justification for military action, most prominently in the January, 2003, State of the Union address, in which President Bush declared that Iraq had sought uranium, citing British intelligence sources
The US acted unilaterally in deciding to invade Iraq in 2002, they had already drawn up plans to go in the spring/summer of 2001 it acted without UN mandate and direct contravention to decisions taken within the Security Council, we were invited along, as well as other members of the coalition forces to give an air of legitimacy to the invasion.
From 2002 to 2005 UNMOVIC (the replacement to UNSCOM) scoured Iraq and could find no traces of any CBR weapons or production, storage facilities other than those already investigated and dealt with by UNSCOM. You can check their databases here:
http://www.vertic.org/onlinedatabase...Background.cfm
In line with UNSCOM, the US also allocated to taskings to their Disaster Preparedness units(they deal with CBR Recce) and the UK tasked assets of its CBR Defence Regiment to parallel work alongside UNMOVIC. Again no evidence of any WMD was found.
As for Chilcott, during the enquiry Blair sidestepped any questions about whether he actually knew that the Iraqi regime had no WMD's. Even when asked directly. Read the transcipts of his testimony, watch the videos of it, the questions were toned down so there was no allegations of his wrong doing and even those that challenged his versions of accounts were carefully sidestepped or answered in a deliberately vague way.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...r-inquiry.html
Saying all that even if the Conservatives had been in power at the time we would probably have still allocated the same resources in the same way at the time of invasion.