Last week Tony Blair finally shifted to displaying the kind of lack of self-knowledge that marks the truly delusional leader. He warned that Iran had ‘No right’ to interfere in the internal affairs of Iraq.

Apparently his mind was undisturbed by any visions of pots and kettles. The risible, monstrous hypocrisy of his statement had no effect on the studied earnest look he has adopted. He was flanked by President Talibani of Iraq, a surname I always thought meant scholar but evidently means puppet. Any respect I might have for the current Iraqi administration died when the Iraqi Deputy PM came to Blackburn constituency in Jack Straw’s pocket to speak for him during the election campaign. That is not something independent states do. President Puppet would like British troops to stay indefinitely, or at least as long as it takes his massively corrupt administration to really fill their Swiss bank accounts.

Blair still doesn’t get it. By invading Iraq illegally, without the support of the UN Security Council, indeed in the full knowledge we would be voted down at the Security Council, we have lost our right to complain when anyone invades anyone else, let alone supplies some bombs, which Iran may or may not have done. And if you invade a country, you are on pretty thin ice to complain when nationals in that country kill some of your troops. They haven’t killed nearly as many of us, as we have of them. Which is why our troops should leave in the very few months it would take to organise a withdrawal.

We have now succeeded in increasing the physical membership of Al-Qaida and related groups to about twenty times previous levels. The idea that toughing it out in Iraq will bring military victory over terrorism, as put forward by President Bush last week, is so far from reality that it must be a particularly crazed God who advises him.

Craig Murray