What to make of the extraordinary events in Iraq recently, as Al Qaida 2.0, in the form of ISIS nasties, advance with Blitzkrieg speed across the country, murdering and burning as they come?
Tony Blair's reappearance as lost prophet, advocating fresh intervention, grizzled and impassioned, has probably done his reputation no favours, and certainly for the Not In My Name brigade there's plenty of fresh ammunition.
I have an interest to declare here. I thought that, WMD or no WMD, Iraq would be better off facing an uncertain future without Saddam than a certain future with him, given that a future with the Butcher of Baghdad in charge was as near as we're going to get to the personification of Orwell's vision of a jackboot stamping on a human face, forever.
It has however been a lonely business pointing out the awkward truth about Iraq's former dictator, and it's cheering to find this article in the Torygraph by one of its foreign correspondents, Colin Freeman.
"Saddam Hussein", writes Freeman, "was just as brutal a killer as ISIS's thugs are, and had Saddam's men had i-phones around to record their atrocities, the results would have been just as horrific. There would however have been one important difference. In Saddam's case, the footage of those toppling into mass graves wouldn't have just been a few dozen or hundred, but hundreds of thousands . . . It's estimated that Saddam killed around 300,000 people (in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991). . . one can't be certain that he would have done the same in the the event of an Arab Spring ten years later. But it does rather suggest he had it in him. . . Half a million people on either side perished in the eight year war that Saddam started with neighbouring Iran, a campaign of trench warfare far more brutal and senseless than anything in World War One. Another 100,000 were killed by the Allied armies as they repelled his equally foolhardy invasion of Kuwait in 1991. And this is before you take into account all those he tortured and killed in secret. . . if Saddam had already directed his armies to kill a million people in the course of . . . 20 years, he might well have done another few hundred thousand had he been left in power. And for that reason alone", Freeman concludes, "we should remember that it is him, not Tony Blair, that is the real villain alongside ISIS".
Amen to all that. And yet quite a lot of people genuinely think Tony Blair is a war criminal for getting rid of Saddam. Funny old world.
