Lobster Blogster

A rather flustered looking Mr Blair struggled recently to answer a question about whether Saddam Hussein should go to the gallows. It made the lobster wonder whether the Prime Minister's thoughts were a little closer to home when he tried to answer the question.

Back in 1998 an international legal precedent was set in Britain when Augusto Pinochet was arrested. Pinochet claimed immunity from prosecution as a former head of state. After a 16 month battle, the international arrest warrant was ruled to be legal, and the extradition to send the former dictator to Spain for trial proceeded (he was to eventually evade justice on medical grounds). Could this legal precedent come back to haunt the Labour leader?

More recently, Democratic politicians in the US had been calling for George Bush's impeachment for "high crimes and misdemeanours" over the war in Iraq. But in the run up to the 2006 mid-term elections, incoming House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi said:

"I have said, and I say again, that impeachment is off the table"

And then the Democrats won. In the post-election aftermath Donald Rumsfeld was resigned. Doesn't it look just a little bit like the Democrats, now in the majority in both houses of the US government, might have done a doing deal with Mr Bush?

So if Mr Bush is not guilty of initiating a war of aggression in Iraq, who is? The Democrats in Washington are working hard to build a consensus with the Republican President; who are they now going to blame for the disaster that is Iraq? For a long time now we have had the image of Tony Blair being Bush's poodle. How long before someone over the other side of the pond suggests that the decisions leading to the Iraq war was really a case of the tail wagging the dog?