Craig Murray’s site links (approvingly) to a site busy collecting signatures in support of indicting Tony Blair for war crimes.

And hurrah!, Noam Chomsky has signed up. As has uber-Darwinian Richard Dawkins, another person who seems to think that his lively insight in one area of science requires us to take very seriously indeed everything else he emits.

Tony Blair can relax. With world-class hypocrite Chomsky in the lead, such an exercise will go nowhere.

I had the doubtful pleasure of listening to Chomsky at a small Harvard seminar in 1999 as he rambled on against Western policy towards Milosevic. The energy of his views about Yugoslavia was in direct proportion to his ignorance of the subject.

Don’t take my conservative/libertarian word for it. Check out this pertinent Marxist analysis of Chomskyist confusion on the subject of Kosovo/Kosova:

There once was a time when the radical critic, faced with rape camps and mass killings against an ethnic minority, could be counted on to attack the offending regime, expose the complicity of the Western powers, and extend solidarity to the victims of oppression. But no more – at least judging from Noam Chomsky’s latest book on the war in Kosova.

The baffling thing about all this ranting against Tony Blair by eg former UK Ambassador Craig Murray is that the sort of people who make the loudest noise about torture in ghastly regimes seem to have a problem when anyone actually does something about it.

No-one doubts the scale of the sustained horror and hundreds of thousands of deaths and maimings directly attributable to Saddam Hussein. The fact that Iraq has some hope now of a decent pluralist future – admittedly at a huge cost on many fronts, as fanatic Saddam supporters and other opponents of freedom have done everything possible to thwart the process – is surely a good thing in itself.

Iraq’s real tragedy is that its own people did not find the strength to rise up to topple Saddam, as the Serbs did to topple Milosevic (albeit with some busy Western help, in which I played a walk-on part) – an outcome Mr Chomsky saw as ‘Western imperialism’ in action.

The twit.