Saddam's victory

I can't recall feeling so angry as when I woke this morning to a new year and read about the way they killed Saddam Hussein.

Masked men taunted him as he stood on the scaffold, and opened the trap door while he was saying his prayers.

It's no defence that the brutal dictator killed thousands, for no one made me complicit in his crimes; but Tony Blair has made me and all my countrymen complicit in this grotesque piece of sectarian vengeance.

Blair told us we were fighting in Iraq to elminate weapons of mass destruction. When none were found, a tinkly New Labour soundbite was invented to cover the gap, with an attractive bit of alliteration: Iraq, they said, was better off with "Saddam in prison than with Saddam in power."

Then they stopped saying that, because it became obvious that even this modest boast was the opposite of the truth. As the Iraqi academics I interviewed for the Guardian last week told me, things were bad under Saddam, but a thousand times worse now. No one even pretends that letting yet more British and American soldiers be killed will improve matters.

And now comes this revolting spectacle, which diminishes and brutalises those who created it - the British and American governments, speaking for their people.

Saddam Hussein was the only man in that grisly execution chamber to behave with dignity. He showed courage in the face of death, when all around him were men trying to make him behave badly. Compare him to the screaming, vengeful masked men, and their backers, the lying politicians in Britain and America. We have turned a brutal, murdering dictator into a martyr. Saddam could not have achieved that. It took our Prime Minister to do that. Yet still we let Blair prance about the world as our representative. Have we no pride left?