Good God, did you actually READ this?

There can be few people who don't know that Saddam Hussein is a mass murderer who treats his own subjects with hideous cruelty and would not hesitate to inflict the most appalling suffering on others.



He has committed dreadful atrocities against internal opponents and twice launched invasions - into Iran and Kuwait - of his neighbours. There can be few people who aren't aware that the Iraqi despot has a lusty appetite for acquiring weapons of mass destruction and he has failed to account to the UN inspectors for the deadliest elements of his arsenal.

There must be few people who can't grasp that the UN inspectors would not have got back into Iraq after a four-year Saddam-imposed absence had he not been threatened with force.

There are surely few people who can't follow Mr Blair's logic when he warns that, unless checked, it is only a matter of time before Saddam makes a marriage of hell with a terrorist group who would exult in the capability of exploding a nuclear device in a major western conurbation such as London.

And there are surely few people who can't see that if Saddam is allowed to emerge smiling from his latest trial of strength with the democracies, then the message will resound around the world that the West is not prepared to protect the freedom and security either of its own people or those less able to defend themselves, encouraging every other rogue state to follow a Saddamite vector.

These are compelling arguments which have been vigorously promulgated by the Prime Minister. So why is he having so little traction on his country?

Why can't he even convince a majority of his own Cabinet?

I think Mr Blair's essential difficulty can be summarised in three words: George Walker Bush.

"I've no hang-ups about removing Saddam. I've no hang-ups about joining the United States in military action," one impeccably loyal and Atlanticist Labour MP commented to me recently. "It's following that cowboy which I find so hard to stomach"



In other words, despite the immense number of reasons for going after Iraq, they don't support it because they don't like Bush.

Odds are that most of the opposition in our own nation can be laid to exactly this reason. The whole thing is about opposing Bush, the Republicans, and the United States in general. The whole thing is about an attitude which would cheerfully see the Mideast go up in flames, and even much of the rest of the world, if they could see Bush burn with it.

Is this totally screwed up or what? At least someone finally has the honesty to admit this.

...Sleaze-bag he may have been, but Bill Clinton had a feel for the erogenous zones of the British, he knew that winning friends here and elsewhere in Europe required a more sophisticated patter than the gunslinging cliches of his successor.

I suppose if the British had erogenous zones, Bill Clinton would be the one who could find them.

In other words, better lies you want to hear that make you feel better than truths that piss you off. Better the sweet talk and bullshit than honesty. I know very unhappy women who feel this way about men. A lot of them felt this way about Clinton.

They want "patter??" Cripes.

Thanks Lindy. Bookmarking this one.