HOW DO YOU SPELL F-A-T-U-O-U-S?

Iraq is not Bush's Vietnam. But it is becoming Blair's (Max Hastings, The Guardian, November 15th, 2004)

A couple of months ago, a senior British officer in Baghdad said to me: "I have been surprised to perceive the moral strength of the Americans here. Before I came, and remembering Vietnam, I thought that by now they would be cracking. Yet I have not met a single American officer or soldier who questions ... what they are doing".

In short, many Americans, including most of those in the armed forces, think that they are doing a great job in the war zone, and are winning - a sharp contrast with the British mood towards Iraq, which grows ever more fractious and cynical. Every death provokes a spasm of anger, driven by disbelief in the value of the sacrifice.

Tony Blair recognises this. How else to explain his maudlin gesture in attending Ken Bigley's funeral in Liverpool? Public dismay is bipartisan. Retired colonels and home counties matrons, usually counted on to stand foursquare behind our boys on the battlefield, regard what is happening as Bush's private folly. They admire our boys as much as ever, but they are as disgusted by the British national role, harnessed haplessly to Washington's chariot wheels, as any Labour backbencher. [...]

Luck, as well as military skill, will play a significant part here, as it always does in war. As yet, the wave of violence elsewhere in Iraq that has followed the US capture of Falluja is on a more limited scale than pessimists forecast. Even those of us who have always had a bleak view of the Iraq commitment should not neglect the possibility that it will end less disastrously than we feared.

Likewise, even those who yearn to see Bush humbled should acknowledge that averting Iraqi chaos is vital to world order. The fact that a much disliked US president will crow if Iraq achieves precarious stability should not make us wish less fervently for this outcome. If no disaster befalls British forces between now and the spring - a big "if" - Blair could make a successful political escape from his Iraqi embarrassments before a British election.

The reverse is also true, of course. There remains much scope for disaster, quagmire, failure. I simply suggest that we should leave aside the question of whether our own prime minister and America's president deserve to get away with what they have done in Iraq. What we do know is that the Iraqi people deserve a chance of peace and freedom. If, against the odds, they get it, we should be ready to celebrate with them.

Translation: The fanatical religious warmonger who broke the law to grab glory and oil, and the hayseed zombies in uniform who do his bidding, just might, through no efforts of theirs, stumble inadvertently onto a free and democratic Iraq. Bummer, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. If so, we demoralized, handwringing sophisticates should perhaps consider halting our attempts to thwart his every move and go fight him elsewhere.