The Iraq War, BBC Two, review As with all the best documentaries, there was no attempt to exaggerate: episode one covered the build-up to war and the programme-makers allowed the drama to speak for itself. They also showed that you can make 60 minutes of gripping television about a subject that is exceptionally well known. After umpteen official inquiries into Iraq, this documentary did manage to break new ground - but not in the way that you might expect. There were no revelations about the British or the Americans, at least in the first episode. This time, however, the men on the other side got to tell their stories. We met two of Saddam's generals, one intelligence chief and, most intriguingly of all, the dictator's last foreign minister. Remember when Colin Powell appeared before the Security Council to present the case for Iraq's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction? With great melodrama, he played a tapped phone call in which an anonymous Iraqi general supposedly orders a subordinate to hide his chemical weapons. Who was the crackling voice that played to the entire world? It turns out that it was General Hamdani. The mild-mannered Iraqi says that he was "surprised" that the "American minister" had made such a fuss over this conversation. After all, he was only telling the officer to look out for any "old ammo left over from the Iran-Iraq war" over a decade earlier. The documentary went some way towards solving the last riddles of the Iraq story. What exactly happened to Saddam's WMD? He certainly had them in 1991 when the first Gulf War ended. Some weapons (but not all) were then destroyed by UN inspectors. Everything had clearly gone by 2003. So when did the final liquidation take place? General Hussam Amin, a key Saddam aide, says that it happened as early as 1991, when the dictator secretly destroyed the entire stockpile. "He ordered us to keep no written records," said the general. Because documents can leak. But, frustratingly, the programme omitted the obvious follow-up question. Given that Saddam abandoned his weapons anyway and had nothing to hide, why not come clean? Why not let the UN certify that Iraq was free of WMD, thereby removing the case for sanctions and war at a stroke? That enigma remains unsolved. The second big mystery concerns why Britain and America were so certain that Saddam possessed his fearsome arsenal? The documentary showed that they thought they had an impeccable source: none other than Saddam's foreign minister, Naji Sabri. In 2002, French intelligence tried to secure his defection via an intermediary. The minister refused to switch sides, but he did let it slip that Saddam had chemical munitions and a nuclear weapons programme. "Decision-makers believed that Saddam's foreign minister had confirmed that Iraq had WMD," said the narrator. But did Sabri actually say that? He later denied ever doing so - and he may not have been in a position to know about WMD anyway. One former CIA official believes that Washington bosses doctored the report of the Sabri meeting.Meanwhile, the intermediary who met the minister refuses to talk. Ten years on, the Iraq affair still holds its mysteries. But this fine documentary marks another step towards finally solving them.