Is the horse weak or strong?

It is now all but orthodox to say that Britain must get out of Iraq sooner rather than later. Irrespective of its constitutional propriety, the declaration by General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, that we should withdraw ‘some time soon’ has been widely welcomed as a much-needed blast of honesty. On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Iraq Study Group, chaired by James Baker, the former US secretary of state, is expected to recommend a dramatic change in strategy, amounting, at the very least, to a phased withdrawal.

With Tony Blair on his way out, and President Bush in the political doldrums of his second and final term, there is a gathering consensus that enough is enough, and that it is time to contrive a Nixonian ‘peace with honour’. But this is to confuse the twilight of the Bush–Blair era with the position the West has reached in Iraq; they are not the same thing. The President and Prime Minister will both be gone by January 2009 — Mr Blair well before then — but the ramifications of the liberation of Iraq will be with us for much longer.

The failures of the West have been appalling indeed. In particular, the decision of the White House to ignore Colin Powell’s plan for reconstruction — flood the country with troops, establish the rule of law, protect infrastructure and key institutions and only then proceed to democratisation — was a disaster. The risible notion that Jeffersonian democracy would somehow spring fully formed from the Iraqi sands has given US neoconservatism a bad name around the world.

Meanwhile there was an abysmal failure of expectation management in the West. As the presidential frontrunner, Senator John McCain, told The Spectator last month, ‘One of the biggest mistakes that I think we made in the United States was to somehow make our citizenry believe that this was going to be a very easy kind of deal.’