In an interview last Sunday, Blair assured us that British forces would not be involved in such an attack. But questioned in parliament a few days later he gave Bush support for an attack. Giving him support, of course, is not the same thing as involving UK troops. And not involving troops isn't, by any means, a full dissociation from an attack.

UK bases in places like Fairford and Diego Garcia would still be used. RAF AWACs might still provide support as well as clandestine SAS troops based on Iran's frontiers. So UK complicity in a US-led attack would still remain high. This would, in turn, lead to making the UK a prime target for revenge attacks by Iran. Once again, Blair is shown up for his cavalier disregard for the welfare of his own people.

What is it, I wonder, that leads him to hold his people in such low disregard? What is it that the US secret services have in his dossier that makes him so easily blackmailable? Since fooling the electorate into giving his party the greatest electoral landslide since 1945 he has done nothing but betray Britain and its European partners over and over in the most sickening sell-offs to America's extreme right.

Firmly attaching his colours to the Project for a New American Century, Blair has done everything he could to revive an Anglo-Saxon hegemony in a world where the dollar -and inevitably the pound- live on strictly borrowed time and that only thanks to an Asian super-power, China. Perhaps the intention was never more than to squeeze a little bit more borrowed time but the price that the world and its people have been forced to pay has been horrendous.

In a thoroughly corrupt world where might is again right and legislatures and judiciaries are coerced by the jack-boot mentality the likes of Blair, Bush and Cheney may never have to pay the full price that their guilt requires of them. They should, at least, be made to know that never in the history of modern politics were ever a bunch more hated and despised than they and should such a thing as natural justice exist then theirs is soon nigh.