The envoy was Donald Rumsfeld. He was then a high-powered executive in the pharmaceutical industry. Today he is the United States defense secretary. In an administration of many hawks he is one of the most hawkish. Rumsfeld wants to wage war on Iraq because he believes that Saddam has an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and is therefore a threat to the world. He must be overthrown — by the people who helped to create his arsenal.

Of course things have changed in 20 years. Iraq had not invaded Kuwait. But it had gone to war with Iran. The difference was that Iran was the sworn enemy of the United States, which was desperate to prevent an Iranian victory.

Rumsfeld could not claim that the administration he served was unaware of Saddam’s evil ways. A month before his visit, the White House was receiving intelligence reports that the Iraqis were engaged in almost daily use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces. Nor did American military help for Iraq stop when Saddam began using nerve gas against his own people, murdering thousands of men, women and children in Kurdish villages.

All this was reported in detail by The Washington Post a few days ago. Campaigners against the war claimed that the disclosures — based on declassified government documents — weakened one of the most powerful justifications for a war: moral outrage at a foul dictator. It is difficult for an accomplice to be outraged by the behavior of his buddy, especially if he knew all along what his buddy was up to and even helped him to do it. The Post reports caused Rumsfeld great embarrassment.

Yet the story made few waves in this country. It was mostly buried on the inside pages of the broadsheet newspapers. Perhaps that is because we have always known about the hypocrisy at the heart of relations between powerful countries and dictators such as Saddam and expect nothing else. Our own hands are scarcely clean. The Scott report into Britain’s arms dealings with Iraq disclosed some shameful behavior.

So let me try to interest you in a report into another aspect of arms dealing that made even fewer waves this past week. The report was written by a couple of pediatricians — Professor David Southall and Bernadette O’Hare — and never managed to make it beyond the pages of the British Medical Journal. Southall worked for Unicef in Bosnia in 1993 and, as a result of what he saw there, set up an organization called Child Advocacy International.

His report dealt with arms that have killed vastly more people than Saddam is ever likely to butcher with his weapons of mass destruction — even assuming he still has them and uses them again. These weapons are now used routinely on the streets of this country. They were used to kill two young women who happened to get caught in the crossfire in Birmingham on Thursday. But Southall’s concern is with the millions of women and children in the poorest countries of the world whose lives are ended or ruined by them every year. They are small arms.

In the 10 years up to 1996 there were 49 “major” conflicts in the world. The main weapons in almost all of them were small arms. Unicef says they caused 90% of the casualties; 2m children were killed, 6m were seriously injured or permanently disabled. Countless others were forced to witness or take part in the violence. The latest figures for 2001 show that small arms were involved in 1,000 deaths a day. The vast majority of them were women and children.

Even those children who were not physically harmed suffered in other ways. In Angola, for instance, two-thirds of the children saw people being murdered, tortured or beaten during their long nightmare of a civil war. The psychological damage is immense. Many were abducted, raped, used as slaves or themselves turned into soldiers. Many more suffered because they could get neither food nor medical help.