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Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.

British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.

Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, told the CIA's station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had "virtually nothing" in terms of WMD.Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was "totally fabricated".

Mali, little known or not, now belongs inside the arc of instability that was once defined as stretching from Afghanistan, in the days when the Taliban took charge, through Pakistan to the Middle East and the Horn of Africa via Iraq and Yemen. Now the arc is rapidly extending westwards beyond the Arab lands to Nigeria, west Africa and the Atlantic seaboard. The common denominators are poverty, underdevelopment, illiteracy, mass youth unemployment, misgovernance, authoritarianism, corruption, suppression of women's rights and of human and civil rights in general. All this and western political and commercial meddling, too.

Despite all this disassociation, despite the looking the other way and the simplistic analysis pitting cut-throat, dynamite-wielding Islamist killers against innocents abroad, this bigger story in which Mali's plight is now entangled ultimately involves us all, more intimately and continuously than could any random threat of a terror bomb in Paris or London. A major shift in perception and in action is required. Otherwise, be it indirectly through mass migration, people trafficking, arms and drugs smuggling, epidemic disease, the pernicious poison of official corruption and abuse; or directly through resulting, premeditated ethnic and sectarian, religion-based violence, the nonchalant, unthinking condemnation of a vast swath of humanity to impoverishment, physical, material and spiritual, will inevitably return to haunt the more fortunate peoples of the west.

Any number of other Libyan armed groups might have had a hand in the killings. But in truth, responsibility may also be traced back, directly or indirectly, to those in London, Paris, Brussels and Washington who launched last year's Nato intervention in Libya with insouciant disregard for the consequences. It was clear then, or should have been, that toppling Muammar Gaddafi was the easy bit. Preventing an Iraq-style implosion, or some form of Afghan anarchy, would be much harder.

Once again, the western powers have started a fire they cannot extinguish. A year after David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy jointly travelled to Libya to lay claim to a liberator's bogus laurels, the Libyan revolution they fanned and fuelled is in danger of degenerating into a chaotic, violent free-for-all.

Do not be misled by the fig leaf of this summer's national assembly polls. Post-Gaddafi Libya lacks viable national political leadership, a constitution, functioning institutions, and most importantly, security. Nationwide parliamentary elections are still a year away. The east-west divide is as problematic as ever. Political factions fight over the bones of the former regime, symbolised by the forthcoming trials of Gaddafi's son, Saif, and his intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi.

"The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain," Tutu argues, "fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us."

But it is Tutu's call for Blair and Bush to face justice in The Hague that is most startling. Claiming that different standards appear to be set for prosecuting African leaders and western ones, he says the death toll during and after the Iraq conflict is sufficient on its own for Blair and Bush to be tried at the ICC."On these grounds, alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague," he says.

Iran, handed geostrategic windfalls in the past decade by Washington's elimination of two of its main enemies, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, now fears the pendulum of regional influence could swing the other way.

The political and military hardliners in control say Syria stood by Iran in its hour of need, the only Arab nation on its side in the 1980-88 war with Iraq, and deserves loyalty now.They also view the conflict in Syria as an extension of a sectarian power struggle with Iran's regional rival Saudi Arabia, as well as a U.S.-led campaign to shackle its nuclear ambitions by sanctions or if necessary by military force.

For Iran, "losing" Syria would be a damaging blow, but prolonged post-Assad instability might offer opportunities to a country adept at pursuing its interests in a conflict-ridden region, as it has shown in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere."Assad is far from gone and even when he is, things are going to be chaotic for a while," said Dina Esfandiary of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. ""And Iran thrives in that kind of context."

In the early years of China's rise to economic and military prowess, the guiding principle for its government was Deng Xiaoping's maxim: "Hide Your Strength, Bide Your Time." Now, more than three decades after paramount leader Deng launched his reforms, that policy has seemingly lapsed or simply become unworkable as China's military muscle becomes too expansive to conceal and its ambitions too pressing to postpone.

The current row with Southeast Asian nations over territorial claims in the energy-rich South China Sea is a prime manifestation of this change, especially the standoff with the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal.

In what is widely interpreted as a counter to China's growing influence, the United States is pushing ahead with a muscular realignment of its forces towards the Asia-Pacific region, despite Washington's fatigue with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pentagon's steep budget cuts.And regional nations, including those with a history of adversarial or distant relations with the United States, are embracing Washington's so-called strategic pivot to Asia.

The future will see fewer counter-insurgency battles in distant lands. It will focus much more on the capacity of America's air and naval forces to balance a competitor like China or face down an antagonist like Iran. And it will scale back America's much-heralded ability to fight two wars at once.

The president said the new strategy would end "long-term, nation-building with large military footprints". The Pentagon would instead pursue a national security strategy based on "smaller conventional ground forces".

Mr Panetta said on Thursday the review would make the US military "more agile, more flexible, ready to deploy quickly".

The Sunni-ruled states of the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, say Iran stirs up unrest in their Shi'ite communities, although many Western analysts believe blaming Iran for protests this year in those countries is an overstatement or at least oversimplification.

"U.S. and Western power in the region is weakening, and that is leaving a vacuum - most notably in Iraq - and you can see the main stakeholders in the region reacting to Iran's readiness to fill that vacuum," says Reva Bhalla, head of analysis at US private intelligence company Stratfor.

This year's uprising in Syria - Iran's rare Arab friend - has created a new battlefield. Since the early days of the uprising, U.S. officials repeatedly and pointedly said they believed Assad's government was receiving support from Tehran.Assad has since been rapidly abandoned by the Arab League, in a diplomatic effort led by Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Arab Gulf states. Analysts and officials say that could have as much to do with pushing back against Iran as in reining in killings and rights abuses in Syria itself.

An American former military contractor who claims he was imprisoned and tortured by the US army in Iraq has been allowed by a judge to sue the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally for damages.

Mike Kanovitz, the Chicago lawyer representing the plaintiff, says it appears the military wanted to keep his client behind bars so he would be unable tell anyone about an important contact he made with a leading sheik while helping to collect intelligence in Iraq.The plaintiff says he was the first American to open direct talks with Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, who became an important US ally and later led a revolt of Sunni sheiks against al-Qaida before being killed by a bomb."The US government wasn't ready for the rest of the world to know about it, so they basically put him on ice," Kanovitz said. "If you've got unchecked power over the citizens, why not use it?"

this is the second time a federal judge has allowed a US citizen to sue Rumsfeld personally.

At the start of the foreign secretary's evidence to the Chilcot panel, Sir Roderic Lyne, a member of the inquiry panel, said it had heard "three rather different explanations as to why we took military action against Iraq in 2003".Tony Blair emphasised the need to impose regime change on Iraq, Lyne said. But Jack Straw, the foreign secretary at the time of the war, stressed the importance of dealing with Iraq's presumed weapons of mass destruction, Lyne said.And Gordon Brown, when he gave evidence on Friday last week, said he supported the war because he thought the will of the international community had to be enforced.

In his evidence Blair said the inquiry should consider what would have happened if the Iraq war had not taken place. He said that an Iraq still led by Saddam Hussein, competing with Iran to acquire WMD and support terrorism, could be an even greater threat today than Iraq was in 2003.

Miliband went on: "The authority of the UN would have been severely dented. If, in the hypothetical case you are putting, we had marched to the top of the hill of pressure and marched down again without disarming Saddam Hussein, that would really have been quite damaging [to the ability of the UN to work together].

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said the 2003 war was "right", as he gives evidence to the UK's Iraq inquiry.

he had been convinced by his own intelligence briefings that Iraq was a threat that "had to be dealt with". But the main issue for him was that Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions - and that "rogue states" could not be allowed to flout international law.

If the international community could not act together over Iraq, Mr Brown said he feared the "new world order we were trying to create would be put at risk".