an icepick through the keyhole

I don't accept Blair would have been a better driver - a more sophisticated one perhaps, a better politician, but for someone like me who bears a bitter, irrational and total hatred of Tony Blair and the way he has betrayed everything Labour used to stand for, it's a matter of chosing between Darth Maul and Jar-Jar Binks, no prize for guessing who's who. Blair's a power-hungry opportunist whose soul agenda is Tony Blair, who rode in on Bush's coat-tails, exploiting the 9/11 tragedy to push himself onto the world stage, and is therefore committed to bending over and squealing like a pig to Bush's redneck banjo player on demand. But I digress.

Yes, the world certainly may be better without Saddam. But at what cost? A hostile international environment. A divided United Nations. The probable deaths of thousands of Iraqis. The costs in lives of an invading Army whose national security is not threatened by this tin-pot little dictator. Years of reconstruction. A economy that cannot support it. It's easy to say, "Yeah, go team!" when you're not the countries who're actually financing the mess or contributing in terms of human lives.

Will the Iraqi people be greatful? The exiles, probably. But the ones whose home the coalition of the damned will be bombing, the ones who will starve in the aftermath, the ones caught in the crossfire? Does the argument "To save the village, we had to destroy it," sound familiar? And was that argument even valid in the first place?

And of course there are the ramifications I've been musing about all along - the emergence of new anti-American pockets, the instability fostered in the region, the feeling of "Who's Next?" on the list - and given the way the US has handled this, do you really want them handling North "I've got the nukes la la la la la" Korea in the same way?

And if you think that the US will help Iraq back on its feet and establish democracy, I can only note that the US has had a brilliant track record in supporting dictatorships over democracies (save for Israel and South Africa), and a lousy track record in reconstruction (see Afghanistan). And those weren't even Shrub administrations. So look at the man, and tell me if he fills you with confidence as the usher of a new golden age of liberation and freedom for Iraq.

And I keep thinking of that paving on the road to Hell.