DO NOT DO IT, Hames. Do not rise to the bait. Do not fall into the trap. Experience has taught you never to engage in a dispute again with Matthew Parris in front of the readers on any subject whatsoever, let alone Iraq.

Iraq! You are doomed. Let it pass. Write about something less dangerous, such as trashing the reputation of the late Queen Mother. Anything but crossing swords with Parris on that issue.

Too late. On Saturday Matthew Parris took to task “Her Majesty’s Brigade of Neocon Columnists and Leader Writers”. As the “good ship Neocon is going down”, he mused (gloated, frankly), they would be “building a liferaft for their reputations”. The collective alibi, he predicted, would be “the principle (intervention in Iraq) was good, but the Americans screwed up the execution”.

This would be, Matthew wrote, “crap” (which I assume is an acronym for Can’t Really be Argued Persuasively) when, in truth, the fundamental cause of this “almighty cock-up” was the “big, bad idea at its root” — namely “that we kick the door in”.

And he named names. Lots of them. Among those building this supposed liferaft were David Aaronovitch (“hammer in hand”), Michael Gove, Danny Finkelstein, Johann Hari (who, as he writes for The Independent, may be thankful for any publicity) and myself who, alongside Margaret Beckett, would be “ripping planks from the deck of this sinking ship”, ready to make an escape, blaming everything on the ineptitude of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Crumbs. It seems to me this attack is remiss for three reasons. The first is Matthew’s obsession with neoconservatives. I agree that Michael Gove is one, and Danny Finkelstein might be a neocon too (one does not intrude into what adults do in the privacy of their own homes) but Aaronovitch and Hari are most certainly not. They hail from the strain of the British Left that has long held that when dictatorships can be toppled they should be. For that matter Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are not neoconservatives but orthodox conservative nationalists. High theory did not take them into Iraq.

As for me, I am not a neoconservative but I am a neo-American. I think that when US foreign policy is wise Britain should back it to the hilt and when it looks wayward we should be in the thick of it so that we can be a potential influence. So if the Americans opted to liberate Pluto tomorrow I would think to myself (i) that is a little odd, (ii) is it worth the effort when the place is not formally a planet anymore? and (iii) how can we ensure that there are seats in their spaceships for the Parachute Regiment?

Many might deem this a manic form of fidelity. It may be. But I take comfort, nonetheless, in the knowledge that I am not entirely alone in my instincts. Back in 2002 one writer eloquently argued that, even if the invasion of Iraq was the maddest of ideas, Britain would end up being deeply involved in it since it is our “destiny” to play that part in global politics. Absolutely. Who said that? Er, Matthew Parris.

Secondly, I am not inclined to castigate the US Administration for what has occurred in Iraq. As Matthew correctly says, it is far from obvious that deploying many more troops after Saddam Hussein was toppled would have made sense, or that the “de-Baathification” of the Iraqi Army and bureaucracy was a miscalculation. For a start, “de-Baathification” was scarcely a deliberate US policy. These institutions simply disintegrated when their leader disappeared.

The largest single mistake, in retrospect, rests elsewhere. The problem has not been the Bush Administration underestimating how much Iraqis might come to loathe the West for the “occupation” but a failure to grasp the extent to which, thanks to Saddam, Iraqis had come to fear and hate each other.

That inter-communal hatred is the present cause of Iraq’s troubles. American soldiers have died in tragic numbers this month not because of any so-called insurgency that wants to drive the US out of Iraq but because they have been attempting to prevent rival religious and sectarian militias from killing their enemies. The effort to hold together a central government in Baghdad (a drive, ironically, designed to reassure the defeated Sunnis) does not command sufficient consensus to sustain it.

What needs to be done now, as James Baker, a former US Secretary of State, appreciates, is to secure a decentralised settlement and convince the Shia majority to divide the oil revenues in a way that each camp will consider fair. In such a situation, as Kim Howells, the Foreign Office Minister, has outlined, US and British forces could be withdrawn steadily throughout 2007 without chaos.

I would not bet against Iraq’s future. That country retains extraordinary attributes. To declare it dead and buried a meagre three years after Saddam’s demise is, to me, premature folly.After all, would the recovery of Germany and Japan have been anticipated in 1948, three years after their surrender? Or the fate of Russia accurately assessed in 1994, during the chaos of the Yeltsin years, three years after the Soviet Union was disbanded? Or would anybody have expected that China would be where it is today in 1992, three years after the Tiananmen Square massacre?

The question that those of us in the pro-war camp have to confront is whether by, say, 2010 Iraq, the Middle East and the wider world will be demonstrably the better for Saddam’s overthrow than if he and his sadistic sons had been left in power. My answer to that question remains, unambiguously, in the affirmative.

There it is then. Others can choose to condemn the Americans and head for the lifeboats, but not in my name. The offer of Mrs Beckett’s assistance is kind, Matthew, yet I do not seek the shelter of a liferaft. I will stay with the ship and take my chances. If the vessel does ultimately capsize, despite my expectations, I will throw a bottle over the side containing the message: “I still think that ‘we kicked the door in’ is a more noble sentiment than the Little Englander’s cry of ‘leave those foreigners to their misery’.”

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