Oooh, wilful misinterpretation. That's quality journalism!

Once again, the BBC demonstrates that they'll be damned if they can't impose their own agenda on a fairly unremarkable news story.

The opening sentence should, in any sensible world, render the rest of the article utterly fatuous. In essence it reads, "Anti-war campaigners have criticised Tony Blair after he suggested he believed in God." But how easy it must be to get confused when you know with such blazing certainty that you were right! How tempting it must be, subconsciously, to infer that what he really said was, "God told me to go to war, and hang the lot of you!"

So, for the record (inasmuch as a blog with no readers, or perhaps one or two very taciturn readers, can be said to be a record of anything except the amount of time I have spare), Blair only said that he believed his decision would "ultimately be judged by God". Not that God was whispering in his ear. He believes he will answer to God for his decision when he dies, not that he's been following God's instructions all along. This is, in fact, an utterly facile distinction that any theologically competent five-year-old could discern. Not the BBC, of course, with all its graduates and expensively trained personnel. Oh no. Reg Keys' comment that Blair was "using God as a get-out for total strategic failure" is way up near the top of the article, and aside from Stephen Pound's praise of Blair's "painful" honesty (a backhanded compliment, and in no way a defence of Blair's remarks or an attempt to inject any sense into the interpretations thereof), the various reactions reported further down the article are, without exception, guilty of the same deliberate misapprehension. This is gold for the BBC: not only do they get to air their anti-war credentials yet again, but they get to beat Blair with their anti-religion Bush-stick in the process.

Yes, I'm an atheist. Yes, I deplore the religious motivation of much Right-wing politics as much as I deplore the mindless collectivism of much Left-wing politics. But I don't hold it against a politician if he happens to have faith. All I ask is that I don't see his faith driving his politics, and much as I've been hating Tony Blair since long before it was hip I can find very little ground to fault him on this matter (the politicisation of religion, on the other hand...). If he believes he'll be judged by God, fine. I suspect God, if he weren't just a superstitious figment, would find very little problem with the liberation of a people from a violent dictator (a "totally unnecessary conflict" - Reg Keys), and if I were He (not much of a leap for the ego, I must confess), my only question would be, "What about Zimbabwe and North Korea and Sudan and Iran and ...?"