Last week a breeze of excitement rippled through the bruschetta crowd. Certain Labour Party members, almost all BBC radio presenters and just about everyone I heard being interviewed on the subject, became animated by the possibility that Gordon Brown had a new and admirable attitude towards the Americans. He was distancing himself from them, no doubt about it. This warm zephyr was mingled with a mightier blast from across the Atlantic, to the effect that the Americans were also distancing themselves from themselves. Everywhere the fantasy of disengagement was being dreamt.

In fact, the evidence for the first proposition was slight, but the will to interpret it was great. You will recall that Douglas Alexander, the Secretary of State for International Development, was seen as being critical of the Bush Administration when he suggested that states should be seen as being great as much because of what they might create as what they could destroy. Since it is a matter of art in the galleries, theatre bars and green rooms that the only country that ever destroys anything is America, Mr Alexander’s speech was capable of just one understanding. His aspirational passage running “internationalist not isolationist; multilateralist not unilateralist; active not passive” – a peroration learnt at the feet of T. Blair – was ignored.

Such a reading seemed sensible following the interview that Sir Mark Malloch Brown, the Minister for Africa, Asia and UN, gave to The Daily Telegraph. His “not joined at the hip” comment either suggested a shift in policy, or else it was meaningless. Happy days, implied a relieved-sounding Mike Gapes, Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Now he and his colleagues were free to be more critical.

I sighed when I heard him. This was never serious foreign policy. To be declaratory, to satisfy yourself that you have said the perfect-sounding thing, may give you comfort, but in reality it achieves nothing. It is, in that sense, onanistic.

Then David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, slammed the French windows shut again. America was our most important single ally, and being joined at the hip with it was an objective of foreign policy. “We are not into the game of hints,” he told Sir Mark. So stop saying dumb things and go off and do the job we just appointed you to do.

Mr Miliband was working in No 10 at the time of the Kosovo war. He will have seen how the entire outcome of that battle for the future of the Balkans turned on Tony Blair persuading a reluctant Bill Clinton to threaten to use US ground forces. Not German ground forces, not UN blue helmets, not an elite company of Malloch Browns armed with resolutions. Mr Miliband may well have contrasted that successful outcome with the elongated agony of a Bosnia about which James Baker, then the (Republican) US Secretary of State, had said: “We have no dogs in that fight.” My guess is that Mr Miliband knows that the request that “Yanks go home” is one of the few wishes which, if wished, may be easily and disastrously granted. He probably also realises that we are in danger of getting it sooner than we expected. It is an irony that many of those who have criticised America for “unilateralism” in its Iraq policy, are now nervously content that it should engage in that most catastrophic of acts, a unilateralist withdrawal.

On July 8 The New York Times carried an editorial, intended to be historic, entitled The Road Home. Its motivation was simply expressed. “Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers,” it said, “is wrong.” Everything that the Bush Administration had predicted for Iraq had gone awry, and the years had passed “without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal”. True, there had been elections in Iraq but “the political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling”. The surge had not worked. As to the argument that withdrawal would lead to civil war, well, “that war is raging, right now”.

Of course a lot of what was written in the editorial was true. I reemphasise the simple point that had I known that 100,000 Iraqis would die after the removal of Saddam Hussein, then I would have argued against military action. But this is a strange moment to abandon Iraq. Far from not working, the surge has only just reached its peak, and even sceptical observers concede that there is real progress, one consequence of which has been a diminution in Iraqi deaths, though an increase in American ones.

There is also the writing off of important counter-evidence. The elections were historic, with most Iraqis voting, and the Government is not, as stated, a creation of Washington, but of the Iraqi electorate. As to civil war, we have partly to thank The Lancet and its absurd figure of 655,000 deaths for creating the impression that nothing could be worse than it is now. It could.

But there is something else about the New York Times editorial that turned it from an honest and courageous cri de coeur to a disingenuous and disreputable bit of moral cowardice. One could jib at the blitheness of its assumptions about postpullout Iraq such as “Kuwait and Saudi Arabia must share the burden of hosting refugees” and “the nations of Europe and Asia have a stake and should contribute”. One could smile at the absurd sentiment that “Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war.”

But what could readers make of there being not one single word in the editorial about what Iraqis themselves wanted the US to do? Not one. Iraqi democrats were depicted merely as being people to be airlifted out of the green zone when the Saigon moment arrived. The calls from Iraqi politicians, local leaders in Anbar, the Kurds and many other groups for the Americans to stay on for the time being were not even referred to. That is true unilateralism.

Oh, not quite. The editorial concludes: “Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraq’s borders.” Why, exactly if the US pulled out unilaterally, would Britain have a responsibility to help? Does The New York Times read its own news from Afghanistan, where we almost daily fulfil our responsibilities in the blood of young soldiers? God save us, and the Iraqis, from a new unilateralist fantasy.

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