When Muntazar al-Zaidi's first shoe arced through the Baghdad press conference, and as George W. Bush - rather nimbly for a man in late middle age - commenced his duck, there began the creation of a metaphor for where we have all got to in the great Iraqi debate. “I am in love with al-Zaidi,” wrote a British comedian, who was disappointed that the shoes missed the hated President. The fact that this was a gesture of contempt among Arabs (as the BBC's Caroline Wyatt told viewers twice in one report) was taken and immediately projected on the entire Arab world by Western commentators. There was no imaginable Arab who could feel anything other than as al-Zaidi felt; it was axiomatic. In Sadr City, smiling mullahs and others of the Moqtada movement held a smiling demonstration. No one was killed.

Egyptian writers called the shoe throwing a “clear response by Iraqis”, Syrians that it was “necessary to invent a new language that Bush might understand” and that footwear tossing was it. A Gazan journalist described how it was “a free Iraqi expressing the feelings of the Iraqi people”. But they would have had to have been men (they were, of course, all men) of little imagination had they not somewhere wondered about the wisdom of casting a public clout at presidents Mubarak or Assad, or Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, as well as the inevitable fate that would have accompanied even the expressed desire of skying a brogue at Saddam Hussein.

Oddly, there was plenty in the occasion for me to be glad about. It was a shoe, not a grenade, and the whole Arab world now has had replayed to it, over and over again, how one may protest in Baghdad, but not in Damascus. That is a big thing. But it was complicated by a worry and a regret. The worry was that Zaidi might be ill-treated, possibly even tortured, by the Iraqi security forces, and the regret was that there is, indeed, plenty that an Iraqi might be furious with President Bush (and, by extension, me) about; namely all those people who have died since the toppling of Saddam, many of whom would have probably have been alive had the invasion not taken place.

By next July the military phase of British involvement in the Iraq imbroglio will be over, after more than six years, and the calls for an inquiry will be renewed. This week that great anti-Establishment insider, Sir Simon Jenkins, who has never yet seen a country or a situation that he thought wouldn't be improved by Western neglect, chided the “pro-war” group for its lack of frankness. “Those who cheered on Iraq and Afghanistan - from Left as well as Right - dare not admit they might have been wrong,” he wrote. According to Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg the other day: “It is time the Government and the Conservatives held up their hands and said sorry to the British people for Iraq.”

Somehow my shoe is in my hand. There is an obvious problem here. Shall we try to imagine this other world, the world where we didn't oust the Taleban and where Saddam, or maybe the lunatic Uday, is still in charge of Iraq? Perhaps the sanctions regime against Iraq has collapsed. Perhaps jihadis throughout the world, and compromising failed states, have absorbed the message of the international community's inability and unwillingness to act.

For some, this kind of reflection is psychically impossible. Listen to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent, yesterday intoxicated, as ever, by her own sense of grievance. “I have words, too weak and inadequate to carry the rage felt by millions at the renewed arrogance of the villains who first devastated Iraq and now garland themselves.”

This, I'm afraid, is the spirit of those lobbying for an inquiry into the war. It is the spirit of anti-history. Many inquiry advocates - those who are not simply opportunist - hope to have their particular version of history finally and officially vindicated. Ms Alibhai-Brown's recollection is, unfortunately, typical. She writes that “the UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Scott Ritter both told us there were no WMDs”, adding that the Tories never believed that “Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that were a threat to anybody”, but “still backed Blair because Conservatives love wars”. These contentions, so boldly stated, are demonstrably and easily proved false. Hans Blix said no such thing, and after the 2002 September dossier, Sir Menzies Campbell told Parliament that: “We can also agree that Saddam Hussein most certainly has chemical and biological weapons and is working towards a nuclear capability. The dossier contains confirmation of information that we either knew or most certainly should have been willing to assume.”

Iain Duncan Smith, then the Conservative leader, certainly believed in the existence of WMD, and has never - unlike some of his colleagues - tried to weasel his way out of his support for the invasion.

As I have written before, after 9/11 Tony Blair thought that Saddam Hussein had to be brought into compliance with UN resolutions on WMD, not least to encourage the others. His preferred strategy was one where a united international community forced Saddam to submit, his least preferred outcome was one in which Saddam was left in place, uncompliant. An inquiry might, I suppose, look at why his diplomacy failed. It should certainly examine the wildly overoptimistic assumptions about how to build the new Iraq and how long it would take. It might, I suppose, seek to establish how far the reconstruction of Afghanistan was compromised by the monumental effort in Iraq.

It won't and can't tell us whether “it was worth it”. And this is where I have the greatest crisis of conscience. I have lost no one in Iraq or Afghanistan. I can reflect that, in terms of casualties, we lost almost as many soldiers in one year - 1972 - in Northern Ireland, as in Iraq. But the reasonable figure for lost Iraqi lives - perhaps 100,000 - is far more than any hawk allowed before the fight began. It is of minimal comfort that jihadis caused most of these deaths, and not much more consoling that, at some point, such a conflict might have happened anyway.

Yet we all know that this is, for some reason, not enough. This is why opponents of the invasion have had also to insist upon the inevitability of partition, of civil war, of the rise of a pro-Iranian theocracy, of the collapse of democracy - none of which has happened. Only a year ago one of the foremost journalist-critics predicted that Moqtada al-Sadr was bound to win the battle of Basra. I hoped he was wrong and feared he might be right. I underestimated the Iraqis, and will try to hope that the January provincial polls, and next autumn's parliamentary election, go smoothly. Just as I hope that the shoe-thrower emerges after his trial on New Year's Eve, whole, defiant, and thus a metaphor for the Iraq that I - perhaps so stupidly - hoped for.

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