THE ROLLING STONES are back in the news. They kicked off another concert tour in Boston on Monday and next month will release A Bigger Bangtheir first original, studio-produced album since 1997. For years these resourceful survivors of the rock era have been staving off the steady detumescence of encroaching irrelevance with a chemically reinvigorating mix of controversy and nostalgia. Bill Wyman’s predilections, Mick Jagger ’s progeny, Keith Richards’ toxicity and endless new compilations of decades-old tunes have kept the blood pumping into all the right places.

This time, the Viagra comes in the form of a song that, though no one has actually heard it yet, is already ensuring bumper CD and ticket sales. It’s an anti-Bush, anti-war track that goes by the title Sweet Neocon.

To Stones fans (and I count myself one) the lyrics suggest there hasn’t been much of a revival in the song-writing ability that deserted Messrs Jagger and Richards when they reached normal retirement age a decade or so ago: “You say you’re a Christian. I think you’re a hypocrite. You say you’re a patriot. Well I think you’re full of shit.”

Not exactly Masters of War, is it? But, hey, when your last outing included a number entitled Might as Well Get Juiced, your fans will take anything that still suggests consciousness.

And yet the timing is exquisite. As the Stones play once again to sold-out stadiums, President George Bush looks more and more like the political equivalent of a failed busker, mumbling his lines to ever less convincing effect and to ever more bemused and contemptuous onlookers.

He and his sweet neocon friends are besieged this late summer. Americans are dying in Iraq at a faster pace than ever. Outside the Crawford ranch Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of a dead serviceman, continues to enjoy the friendly glare of media attention. Republicans are nervous, with some openly talking now about the need for a US withdrawal from Iraq.The President’s approval ratings have dived further and are now, by some measures, lower than Richard Nixon’ s were when impeachment proceedings began against him over Watergate.

Far more important than the fortunes of this finite presidency, the neoconservative dream of democratic transformation in the Middle East looks as plausible these days as Mick Jagger in a leotard; the hard reality of the President’s Iraq policy looks about as edifying.

Where once the US talked of creating a peaceful, stable democratic country, Iraq now looks closer than ever to a civil war between, on the one side, proponents of a Shia theocracy allied to Hezbollah-friendly Iran, and on the other promoters of an international terrorist ideology allied to Saddam-friendly Baathists. Sorry, but whose side are we on again?

The travails of the constitution-making process have raised more doubts about the feasibility of democratic nation-building in an ethnically diverse Muslim country. The struggle to get agreement on the proper role of Islam in the nation’s basic law leaves most western democrats queasy about the status of women, gays and non-Muslims in the future Iraq. The failure to get the Sunnis to agree, and their campaign now to defeat the constitution, looks ominous.

All this is leading many in America, even conservatives, even neoconservatives, to begin to doubt the wisdom of the war. Did we really fight to make Iraq safe for fundamentalist mullahs to force women into hiding while thuggish Sunni, Shia and Kurdish militias duke it out on the streets? Mission accomplished?

And it leads inevitably, to the question at the heart of the neoconservative world view: weren’t we better off with a dictatorship, that, for all its faults, at least walled in the chaos? The answer is still “no”.

Not just because the case for invading Iraq was based on the former regime’s grotesque defiance of international law — demonstrated repeatedly from the invasion of Iran up to UN Security Council resolution 1441. Nor is it that the moral imperative for powerful, free states to intervene on behalf of oppressed peoples is compelling.

The reason is that the apparent stability that Saddam provided for us was a false stability. You can’t treat a people as he did for 30 years and not create the conditions for explosive violence with long-term implications for your own people and way beyond your own borders. Indeed what we are seeing now is not what would have happened in the absence of Saddam, but the consequences of what Saddam did to his own people for all that time. You cannot build an international order by embracing tyranny for half the world — we tried that in Iran and Saudi Arabia and Indonesia for decades. We didn’t get stability; we got violence, much of it directed at us.

In any case, the criticism of the Iraq constitution-in-progress is overdone. It is not a perfect model of democracy; it was never going to be. But neither does it enshrine an Iranian-style Islamic law. Not the least important evidence for that is that Iraq’s Shia leadership, having watched with disdain and alarm events to their east, have no desire to model their country on the powder-keg theocracy next door.

The most important thing about the document is that it is, above all else, Iraqi. It was constructed by Iraqis and if it is approved by referendum, it will represent the will of the people. Self-determination remains, as it has done for a century now, the only real basis for lasting international peace.

The sweet neocons have got many things wrong. They may have been naive about how easily and quickly a free Iraq would emerge from Saddam’s ruins. They may underestimate differing levels of ethnic, religious and political resistance to democracy. But the path of chaotic freedom down which they want to nudge the world remains a better route than the alternative, supposedly realist approach to international affairs that we have tried in the past. That, I ’m afraid, winds up being nothing less than sympathy for the devil.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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