After all, there had been, as he put it, "difficulties with the inspectors." He had asked him about those, as if it were the inspectors who were the problem. And nodded sympathetically as Saddam explained that, although he had his doubts "whether these resolutions have any basis in international law," he had no interest but to "facilitate their mission to find the truth." There was more in that vein. "I have come for one reason only," Mr.

Benn assured his subject at the outset, to see whether "you can help me to see what the paths to peace may be." After a few quick warm-up questions -- does Iraq have any weapons of mass destruction, do you have links with al-Qaeda, what is your favourite colour -- it was on to the meat of Mr. Benn's agenda: "There are people who believe this present conflict is about oil, and I wonder if you could say something about how you see the enormous oil reserves of Iraq being developed." And then, perhaps fearing that had been a little too hardball, this closer question: "There are tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people in Britain and America, in Europe and worldwide, who want to see a peaceful outcome to this problem," he began. "I wonder whether you could say something yourself, directly through this interview, to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?" And that was it. Not: "Why have you refused, over 12 years, to disclose the whereabouts of the thousands of tonnes of chemical and biological weapons you have yourself admitted to possessing?" Not: "Why should anyone believe you now, when in the past you have been caught repeatedly in the most flagrant lies -- denying that you had ever produced biological weapons, for example, until your own son-in-law gave us proof that you had?" Nothing about the torture and murder of dissidents -- often at Saddam's own hands -- the gassing of the Kurds, the invasion of two neighbouring countries, the nearly two million deaths for which he is directly culpable.

Oh well, it's Benn -- dear old Tony, Barmy Benn, patron saint of the loony left.

Except it isn't just him. This sort of stuff is sprouting up all over.

Wasn't it Rick Salutin arguing in The Globe and Mail that Saddam's real offence was "disobeying the U.S."? And didn't Linda McQuaig, taking up the same theme in the Toronto Star, advance the notion that Saddam is a target because "he's an unco-operative, anti-U.S. economic nationalist"?

You know, like Walter Gordon.

And didn't The New York Times run a long piece by Stephen Pelletiere, a former CIA officer described by Daniel Pipes as "Saddam Hussein's chief apologist in the United States," explaining that, in fact, Saddam did not kill 5,000 Kurds with poison gas at Halabja, an atrocity that has been amply documented by Human Rights Watch and other groups, and asking why we are "picking on" Iraq for its human rights record?

Is this what the anti-war left is coming to? Genocide denial?

Little by little, the left is beginning to convince itself that Saddam is the hero of the piece. (I need not even mention the example of Colleen Beaumier, MP, whose pronounced judgment on the Iraqi regime was that they were "extremely charming.") What started with moral equivalence -- how dare the United States raise a stink about nuclear weapons, a mere six decades after it bombed Japan? -- has quickly mutated into an outright preference for Saddam.

After all, as Ms. McQuaig notes wistfully, whereas "in the past U.S.

interventionism was held somewhat in check by the existence of another well-armed superpower ... with the end of the Soviet threat" that is no longer the case. Enter Saddam: plucky holdout against U.S.

imperialism, Asterix the Gaul to America's Rome.

I don't mean to turn this into a left-right thing. There are a great many honourable people of the left who oppose the war on decent, principled grounds. Others, such as Christopher Hitchens, David Remnick and Michael Ignatieff, have come reluctantly to the conclusion that there is no alternative. And the anti-war right has its share of loons, such as Patrick Buchanan.

But I never thought I'd see anti-Americanism refined to such potency as to make a hero out of Saddam or find the armies of Iraq attended by camp followers from the West.