It is worse than Vietnam, because the enemy is punier and the original ambitions greater. At the time of the invasion in 2003 the US believed it could act alone, almost without allies, and win In this it has utterly failed. About 1,950 American soldiers have been killed, 14,900 have been wounded, and its military command still has only islands of control. It is a defeat more serious than Vietnam because it is self-inflicted, like the British invasion of Egypt to overthrow Nasser in 1956. But by the time of the Suez crisis the British empire was already on its death bed The disaster only represented the final nail in its coffin.

Perhaps the better analogy is the Boer War, at the height of British imperial power, when the inability of its forces to defeat a few thousand Boer farmers damagingly exposed both Britain's real lack of military strength and its diplomatic isolation.From the beginning, Iraq was a strange war for the US to fight. The first President George Bush led a vast UN-backed coalition to a conclusive victory in the Gulf War in 1991 largely because he fought a conservative war to return the Middle East to its situation prior to the invasion of Kuwait. It was a status quo to which the world was accustomed and whose maintenance was therefore supported internationally - and in the Middle East.What his son, George W Bush, undertook 12 years later in 2003 was far more radical. It was nothing less than an attempt to alter the balance of power in the region and hence in the world. The US would take control of a country with great oil reserves.

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It would assume quasi-colonial control over a nation which 15 years previously had been the greatest Arab military power. Why did the US do it? One Iraqi leader, who has frequently met George W Bush attributes many of the bizarre events of the last three years to him "What a strange man," he exclaimed.

"Not stupid but very, very strange." This strangeness and separation from reality became more evident as the conflict escalated. The debate on why the US invaded Iraq has been over-sophisticated. The main motive for going to war was that the White House thought it could win such a conflict very easily and to its own great advantage. They were heady times in Washington at the beginning of 2002, as the final decisions were being taken on invading Iraq It was the high tide of imperial self-confidence The US had just achieved a swift victory in Afghanistan. The Taliban forces had evaporated after a few weeks of bombing by B-52s and the withdrawal of Pakistani support. Their strongholds in Kabul and Kandahar fell with scarcely a shot fired.There seemed no reason why Saddam Hussein should not be defeated with equal ease.