Saddam was broadly good, then, before the wicked Americans came along. (Apart from the "totalitarian nature of the regime", which he mentions briefly, in passing, bloodlessly and with no post-1991 illustrations, as ever).It is a sign of how deranged the far left has become that one of their most prominent spokesmen can be seriously accused of being a paid agent of an appalling totalitarian regime, and it doesn't surprise anyone. Whether or not Galloway is actually Saddam's client (he says he'll sue the Telegraph), it should shake all decent people who followed Galloway's call to realise that he has only spoken in ways that would comfort Saddam and his gang of torturers. For this, he was applauded time and again at anti-war rallies by the very people who should be most repulsed by tyranny.If you are one of the mostly decent people who cheered Galloway at the anti-war rally, now is the time to pause and ask yourself: "What did I do?" I am drawn to the left; it is my political home; but something has gone horribly wrong for us when Saddam-saluting Galloway can be seen as one of our leaders. The day when the left might not even have to be paid by a tyrant – when it might be offering him comfort for free – is a day from hell. We are living in that long, suplhur-scented day.j.hari independent.co.uk More from Johann Hari. The shadow of the Iraq war continues to hang over the world economy – but it is a different shadow from that of a few weeks ago.

Then the principal concern was that economic confidence might be shattered by a prolonged conflict Fortunately that did not happen But there is a different reason for concern. This is that the glue that holds global economic relationships together is under stress and those relationships may be damaged. But left to itself the world economy ought to be able to recover. All the experience of recoveries from the downswings of the past half-century suggests that it is normal for economic progress to be two steps forward, one step back.

The backward step is needed to give time to sort out the excesses of the forward ones: to write off lousy investments in, for example, empty office blocks or unused telecommunications kit.But to recover there has to be faith in the future and in particular in the world's trade and payments systems. The great motor of growth since the Second World War has been international trade organised on a multilateral basis: countries buying and selling more and more freely from each other. The alternative – competing trading blocs – was explored with catastrophic results during the 1930s.The Iraq war is barely over but it does not take huge sensitivity to realise that the principle of multilateralism has been damaged. Up to now the main attention has been focused on the damage to political and military institutions – the UN and Nato – and that is understandable and right. In the future, however, the world may come to regret the damage to economic institutions, too – the EU and Nafta in the first instance, but the WTO, World Bank and IMF as well.The names of these bodies are such an alphabet soup and the way they present themselves so user-unfriendly that most of us tend to take for granted the benefits they have brought and snipe at them when they fall short.