Brian Reade Column: Glory, glory.. Blair's a loser.

Byline: BRIAN READE 

AS the fat lady sings across Iraq, it is time to tot up all the gains in our latest glorious crusade.

The human race may have lost between 5-15,000 members and be no more enlightened as to who was behind the September 11 atrocities.

The United Nations and the Geneva Convention may be effectively dead, Britain may have squandered pounds 3billion of much-needed taxpayers' money and the coalition failed to find a single weapon of mass destruction or capture the Ba'athist butcher.

But they did get hold of his DNA.

So rejoice. If your house is broken into and the burglar cuts himself, at least police will be able to eliminate Saddam Hussein from their inquiries.

Iraq's shops, museums, libraries and banks may be stripped clean by looters and their surgeons performing operations on the 5,500 injured with machine-guns round their necks but at least the oil wells are safe and the dollar is the new currency.

The cities may be flattened but at least the American firms, especially Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton, have pocketed all the lucrative contracts to put it back together again.

So rejoice. Especially if you are one of the millions who bizarrely switched from being anti-war to pro-war over the past three weeks. My, what principles you have.

You oppose a war because it has no legal backing and no clear or honest cause, then because it is being won, you support it. Which either makes you one of those insecure small-town kids who ignores their local team in favour of Manchester United, or an intelligent person who realised what you were seeing was not actually a war, so you couldn't be bothered opposing it.

Which is fair enough, because it wasn't a war was it? Wars usually have battles but this one failed to have any.

Just a few skirmishes and the blanket bombing by a world superpower trying out its WMDs on an already-battered Third World country.

Heck, us guys had so much to fear from that crazed killing machine Saddam Hussein.

I am actually glad the whole disgraceful episode is over and our troops are coming home.

I am delighted for any Iraqis who find that living in an American colony improves their lives. But I have massive fears for the Middle East and worries over revenge attacks on our own people.

Tony Blair may have scored a personal victory with Middle England but the damage he has inflicted on the Labour Party will take a very long time to heal. I would not dream of voting Labour on May 1 and I hope millions of lifelong supporters abstain too.

Because he has not helped to make this world a safer place, just moved it even further into the hands of a megalomaniac who will not be happy resting on this one easy victory.

They tell us Bush has no plans to invade Syria just yet because he wants to win re-election. After that, well anyone who disagrees with America's quest for global dominance had better watch out.

The former addict needs his new power fix and now he has defied the UN to launch one pre-emptive strike, who is going to stop the junkie if he fancies another?

Exactly 138 years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a Washington theatre. I am not going for a gag about it happening again, because let's face it, the chances of a philistine like Bush being seen dead in a theatre are nil.

But there is one quote from the 16th US president that the 43rd should heed well: "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Like most things in life, the truth about this unnecessary slaughter and shameful land-grab will out.

It is as inevitable as the hollow victory the pro-war hawks now celebrate so smugly.

CAPTION(S):

BLAIR: Victory at a price