John Pilger is writing from and for readers in the U.K., so his title suggests a much more parochial statement than what you will actually find in its text. The first part of the essay is an extraordinary attack on the American and British governments; the second lines up the argument in horible detail. The combined effect is devastating, just about the last word on the subject of this mad war and the system which is planning it. Don't read it before dinner.

To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance from the killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share responsibility.

He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American "interests", such as a voracious appetite for the world's resources, like oil.