So Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death. The latest chapter in a pretty sorry chain of events which the UK helped to bring about. It won't bring about an end to the violence that we see on a daily basis.

Nobody would deny that Saddam Hussein is a vile human being. He deserves no compassion or sympathy. But surely a life sentence would have been the best way to make him pay for his crimes, left to rot, forgotten. This way, quite apart from the fact that the UK does not support the death penalty, (although we can hardly trumpet the 'fledgling Iraqi democracy' we claim to have created and then condemn its findings), it surely just allows him one more moment in the spotlight and risks making him a martyr?

What also appears to have gone unnoticed by those who have hailed yesterday as a 'good day for Iraq' was that Saddam will go to the gallows as a result of a massacre in the village of Dujail in 1982. That was in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam was backed wholeheartedly by both the US and the UK. Our favourite Middle Eastern son, battling against the evil Islamic clerics in Tehran. Oh, the bitter bitter irony.......