An eerie silence

Tony Blair has been unusually quiet on the subject of Saddam Hussein's death - perhaps he finally realises what his legacy will be.

While Tony Blair was sampling Staying Alive at the home of Bee Gee Robin Gibb, Saddam was being ignominiously executed to the taunts of Shia guards and witnesses to his death. While senior Americans voiced their distaste for the manner of Saddam's dispatch, only John Prescott found it within himself to express his own disgust at the way in which Saddam was sent to meet his maker.

The prime minister's spokeswoman tried to make the best of things at yesterday's regular lobby briefing. Her evasive responses to journalists' inquiries only underlined the silence of the prime minister himself. Perhaps he has at long last understood the benefit of the old adage that "least said, soonest mended".

He is to leave his office this year, and will presumably seek a less challenging role for his post-prime ministerial years. Whatever he chooses to do, his legacy will remain Iraq, and the albatross around his neck that it became. His Trappist reticence about Saddam's death is probably the first Iraqi event about which he has failed to comment upon in the last five or six years. Perhaps it is because he has finally understood it has become his personal nemesis.

Meanwhile, President Bush is reported to be considering putting up to another 30,000 American infantry into Baghdad, in one final deluded attempt to put down what he believes to be an insurgency. It is not - it is a civil war, as Vietnam was ultimately a civil war, as well as an attempt to reunify a wholly artificially divided nation.

Saddam's demise does nothing to help British or American politicians to extricate themselves from the sorry mess they have created in Iraq. Rather, it makes it ever more likely that, regardless of more troops, Iraq will be seen as a defeat for the "coalition of the willing". It is also understood increasingly as a distraction from the real issues creating such instability in the Middle East.

The problem is, of course, ego. Bush, Cheney, Blair - all are hoist on the petard of an illegal and immoral war on Iraq. They cannot even offer the prospect of a positive outcome, as the statistics grow worse. The American death toll has now reached 3,000, with many thousands of seriously injured soldiers already repatriated. Meanwhile, the death toll of Iraqi civilians in December was the highest for any month in 2006.

While this raging storm builds in intensity, we are being told that President Bush has six months in which to redeem his presidency, not only in Iraq, but in Iran. The softening-up process is well under way for an attack on Iran, whether by Israel or the United States. It is even suggested that the United Kingdom would be complicit in such an attack on Iran - a pre-emptive strike to take out Iran's nuclear potential.

In the meantime, Tony Blair has bowed to Saudi pressure and allowed BAE off the hook over bribery allegations in the Al-Yamamah arms deal. At the same time, we embrace the anti-theocratic Musharaf regime in Pakistan - a regime a sliver away from an Islamic revolution that would deliver ready-made nuclear weapons and missiles to Islamic extremists. This inversion of sensible prioritities by Bush and Blair is beyond belief. Perhaps at least the latter can plead being demob happy himself - or is it a case of advanced "Saturday Night Fever"?