Dear Matthew,

Oh, I’m not inviting you to forget about the past, it’s just that – now, five years on – I’m disinclined to go there with you. We have said everything useful we have to say about the decision to invade, and not just once but dozens of times. That this stuff is having its effect on us is evidenced by the fatigue in our language. American imperialism? Leave that to Tariq Ali, Matthew – the Yanks don’t want an empire. That temporary freemasonry, the neocons?

Surely the people who really messed this up were the old cons, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. Unilateralism? I never knew you were such a fan of the UN and the EU.

Let me elaborate. If George Bush and Tony Blair had turned round in early 2003 and – in oracular style – told me how long and bloody this would all be, then I would never have gone for it. But I am afraid that is not the same thing as saying either that it was the wrong thing to do, or that the long-term consequences will be disastrous. It may not have been and they may not be.

This is a hard equation, since so many Iraqis have died, and in the end the judgment – for me – will be mostly theirs to make. You raise the question of the deaths of our Service personnel in Iraq but might note (not that it detracts one tiniest bit from the individual loss) that 175 have been killed in Iraq in five years, compared with, say, 258 killed for the Falklands in six weeks. Your key words are, “all to no purpose”. But that is precisely the thing that you do not know. Arguably, one consequence of the invasion of Iraq was the accelerated abandonment by Libya of its WMD programme. How would you compute that?

You state as though it is a fact culled from a God-given Book of Facts that compared with, say, September 10, 2001, the US and Britain have lost traction in the world. I think that’s very far from clear. Can you imagine any state consciously allowing its territory to be used as a base from which to launch terrorist attacks on the West?

As of today, postsurge, for all the dangers and dead archbishops, the wantaway Kurds and the want-in Iranians, there seems a reasonable prospect of a largely democratic Iraq that constitutes no threat to its neighbours.

Perhaps it’s war-tiredness, perhaps it’s just a lull, or perhaps – at a huge cost – we’re getting what we fought for, and what soldiers died for.

What we still don’t have, however, is an agreement about how best to police the world, and whose job it is to provide the gendarmes. We can see some of the consequences of that in Afghanistan, others in Darfur. By this time next year, with a new American president, perhaps we can reopen that discussion – whether or not pro-war British journalists have apologised to everyone’s satisfaction.

See you there, I hope,

David

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