But what on earth was untrue about what I said there, Ireland? That Britain was weaker than Germany by the summer of 1940? Or that Britain was an expansionist imperial power when it was in a position to be?

Look at a map of the world dating from the first part of the century, and se how much is red. That was the British Empire. "Wider still and wider shall the bounds be set, God who made thee might, make thee mightier yet."

If you read into what I said some suggestion that there's no difference between Saddam and Churchill, or between Britain in 1949 and Iraq in 2002, you're reading into it something I never actually said, and something I wouldn't have said.

If I believed that two wrongs made a right I would have said so. Two wrongs make two wrongs.

If they had tried to "fight on and take Russia" at the end of World War II the most likely result would have been mutiny by the troops, and Communist governments throughout Western Europe.