After the outraged hype generated by Blair and his ministers over the 15 British sailors who were "paraded" on Iranian TV, the Ministry of Defence has now allowed them to be "paraded" in the British tabloids -as part of six-digit deals.

Ironically this is being presented as some sort of "compensation" for what the 15 went through. Of course, for the powers that be, there cannot be anything wrong with this, since anything can be bought and sold in their society!

However, coming from a government which has no concern for the fate of the soldiers it sends to the killing fields of Iraq, this is not innocent.

Indeed, what does it care about the mental disarray of men and women who were ordered to turn their weapons against the Iraqi people they were supposed to "free"? Or about the ordeal experienced by wounded soldiers returning from Iraq, which may still be shrouded in secrecy, but is, nonetheless, nothing short of a scandal. And what does it care, of course, about those who will have lost their lives just to tighten the stranglehold of a handful of big City players over the Middle-East?

If, for once, this government had any concern for the fate of these 15 soldiers, the MoD's huge budget would have been enough to grant them a more dignified compensation, including a decent job away from the bloody chaos of Iraq.

But the whole point of this is elsewhere. Over the past 4 years Blair and Brown have been waging a criminal war against the Iraqi people. But, at the same time, they have been waging a propaganda war against the rest of us. This media business is part of this propaganda war - to give credit to the idea that the Iranians are the "bad guys" and British commanders the "good guys". The trouble is that, whatever ministers may say or get the soldiers to claim, no-one will ever believe that they were closer to Britain's territorial waters than to Iran's.

The point is that British troops have nothing to do anywhere in the Middle East and they should be withdrawn now!