WHEN Saddam's thugs have been cleaned out of Basra by the Desert Rats and Baghdad has been liberated and its people freed from the dictator's torture machines, what will the BBC find to carp about then?

The corporation's coverage of the war has been a catalogue of despicable lies and innuendo quite up to the standard of anything produced by Saddam Hussein. I was listening to the Today programme yesterday morning, when James Naughtie was asking an army general what was going on in the war zone: "Because," said Naughtie, "it's hard to know what to believe. Last week we were said to be bogged down; now we're in the centre of Basra and Baghdad."

The senior army man was too polite to reply, "Who said we were bogged down last week?" Why, the BBC of course. I didn't hear any US or UK spokesman say, "Well, as a matter of fact Jim lad, we're really rather bogged down." It was all simply a case of media chatter and war as entertainment. Actually, it is much worse than that. The people who run the BBC - and every English institution you can think of - hate the culture in which they live. That is, they hate traditional Britain and everything which this country used to stand for.

They were all - and here I use a most inappropriate word - "educated" in the 1960s: only they did not receive an education; they merely picked up the vibes. And the vibes were? Anti-Americanism, against the war in Vietnam, in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament. They were, some of you might even be old enough to remember, against the moderating post-colonial powers in Africa and in favour of men such as Robert Mugabe who has since turned his beautiful country into a torture chamber.

Fair enough, a little stupidity is endearing in a 19-year-old university student, masking his inchoate teenage bolshiness beneath a veneer of radical chic; but to believe those idiocies when you're 55 and in a senior position at the BBC is, as G.K.Chesterton remarked, "...to stretch the folly of one's youth to be the shame of age." Really, these aging lefties in the BBC, The Guardian and The Independent are rather disappointed that their prophecy to the effect that Iraq "...will become another Vietnam and the Americans will be bogged down there for years" shows no sign of coming true.

I am waiting for the final scene. Let's suppose it goes like this: the Allies capture Saddam Hussein and take him into custody. They sit him down in front of a plate of eggs and bacon and a glass of his favourite Mateus Rose. What happens next? Well, of course, in comes a BBC presenter and complains vigorously about the abuse of Saddam's human rights.

There are aspects of this conflict that are beyond even the treacherous cynicism of the BBC. My church houses a Chapel of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers and we hold the Remembrance Service here every November. Last weekend a young Fusilier, Kelan John Turrington, was killed in action, aged 18. Here are heroes. God bless you Kelan. Rest in Peace.

*Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange