That last post was inspired by this article. Leaders, the supposed good guys, lie and spin as they see fit. I don't think I would much care if they would just stop putting their aims in religiously righteouss language. But I guess that is the job of almost any government in history, bar the communists - to convince the people that "God is on our side".

Mr Bush spoke of the tens of thousands of opponents of Saddam Hussein who had been arrested and imprisoned and summarily executed and tortured � "all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state".

But there was no mention, unfortunately, that all these beatings and burnings and electric shocks and mutilations and rapes were being merrily perpetrated when America was on very good terms with Iraq before 1990, when the Pentagon was sending intelligence information to Saddam to help him kill more Iranians.