Iraq: There's no good end in sight for this bad war

herald: Like the prime minister, people who favoured the invasion of Iraq have become adept at making the best of a bad job. This is a little easier for someone safely in the west than it is for an Iraqi.

The bad parts are, after all, very bad indeed and the best of the situation is - at best - a matter of opinion.
Britain and the Americans put troops in. Do they now take those troops out? If they remove their forces they could consign Iraq to decades of murder and civil war. If they remain they will give insurgents and their jihadist associates every reason to fight on. A conundrum.

If the westerners stay they stay as occupiers because all hope of a stable indigenous democracy has gone. If they quit the world is liable to conclude that the self-styled liberators have cut and run. They will be seen, reasonably enough, as abdicating responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Consequences flow from consequences. In the United States, the praetorians of neo-conservatism are making their excuses. Iraq wasn't supposed to be this way. Democracy was supposed to spread by osmosis across the Middle East. The overthrow of Saddam was supposed to resurrect a friendly oil giant. George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were supposed to have thought - once would have done - about the war's aftermath. Instead, neo-cons have stopped sneering at anyone who mentions Vietnam.

Bush is irredeemably unpopular as a result. Tony Blair's equally forlorn leadership has become a Ruritanian melodrama, another post-imperial lesson in the gulf between power and pretensions. If you believe half of what you read and hear, both men are preoccupied, as the footlights dim and the curtain falls, with their legacies. What will people one day think? What will history say? As characters in Spike Milligan's sketches would mutter when the writer denied them a punch-line: "What are we going to do now?" Read more