Congratulations to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who won reelection by a VERY narrow margin. I'm sure he continues to believe his actions in trying to bring democracy to Iraq will be vindicated.

In fact, let's take a look how at well this democracy thing is working out, shall we?

Let's see.... The new government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari was sworn in April 28, a mere ten days ago. Since then, 290 Iraqi civilians have been killed in assorted attacks by insurgents.

Jeez.... At this rate, there won't be anyone left alive to vote in the NEXT election!

That works out to an average of 29 deaths per day. Now I don't have the exact figures available at the moment, but I'm guessing that the rate of executions during my regime, averaged out over the course of 34 years, was somewhat lower than that. Granted, there were days where I gassed a couple of villages at a time, and that would cause a temporary spike in the numbers. But then there were also times where I killed fewer than 29 people during a given 24 hour period, and that would tend to bring the average back down to a perfectly reasonable level of, say, 26.4 people per day. These numbers assume, of course, that you're not counting Kurds or Shiites.

So clearly the people of Iraq were better off with me than without me!!