In March 2004 a newly arrived marine officer wandered into the control room of America’s Camp Victory outside Baghdad. He was overawed by the rows of desks tiered as in a movie theatre, each equipped with multiple laptops and surrounded by giant screens.

The screens displayed live pictures from Predator drones showing American convoys and supposed enemy deployments in real time. It was the latest high-tech infantry war, the sort that could not be lost. Within days Falluja exploded and within weeks the Sunni triangle was aflame. It has been aflame ever since.

Five years after September 11, 2001 there is no discernable western policy in the Middle East. As Hezbollah’s rockets rain down on America’s ally Israel and bombers plot their attacks on western airlines, the bold ambitions of George Bush and Tony Blair seem in ruins.

The plan was to create a nexus of stable, democratic, pro-western states as a bulwark against Islamic fanaticism. All news from the region suggests that the policy has failed. Aggressive military intervention, likened by Blair to a crusade, has been halted by civil war in Iraq and rising insurgency in Afghanistan. Everyone outside the “denial bunkers” of the White House and Downing Street knows this to be true.

At some point the American and British governments must emerge from the toxic shock of failure. Fine words about “defeat not an option” and “we shall never walk away” are wormwood. These armies know they are not winning and cannot wait to walk away. American and British troops have somehow to be disengaged from Iraq and Afghanistan and to avoid entrapment in south Lebanon.

There may never be peace in this region but there cannot be one enforced by the West when it is seen as an alien occupier. Iran must be brought on side. Negotiation must open with secular dictators and Islamist democrats alike. Diplomacy in the region must recover its confidence or there will be bloodshed without end.

The failure of the post-9/11 project does not lie just in body bags and death tolls. It does not lie in the funeral dirges of Lebanon and Israel, the bombings in Baghdad and the British Army’s game of cat and mouse in the deserts of Helmand. Failure lies in the madrasahs and training camps of Pakistan, in Afghanistan’s booming poppy crop, in money pouring north from the Gulf to enrich the Taliban and the Baluchi warlords.

It lies in the belief, beamed by propagandists into every Muslim’s home, that America and Britain mean him ill. These peoples can never be “defeated” by the West, any more than were the Pashtun Talibs in 2001, the Sunnis of Falluja in 2004 or Hezbollah now. They draw glory and support from having America as their enemy. They also know that the West is tiring of this fight. They can see the way the wind is blowing.

It is blowing Connecticut’s way. Last week’s primary defeat of Joe Lieberman, the pro-war senator, was (among other things) a clear sign of the Iraqi worm turning. In Vietnam America was defending a free country against an invading dictator and the free world against communism. Having punished the Taliban in Afghanistan and having toppled Saddam Hussein, Americans can no longer see what they are achieving.

Troops in both countries are barely able to defend themselves, let alone bring peace and order to the populace. Besides, it was Donald Rumsfeld (echoing Bush) who in 2002 explicitly eschewed nation building, claiming, “I don’t know people smart enough . . . to tell other countries the kind of arrangements they ought to have to govern themselves.” Inside every neocon is an isolationist bursting to get out.

Hamid Karzai in Kabul is increasingly at odds with the foreign advisers cramming his capital. In Baghdad Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, has publicly requested foreign troops to leave everywhere but his capital by the end of the year.

I have always thought that America would decide to leave Iraq before Britain. America has a more responsive democracy and when it speaks government must listen. Its constitution may encourage brinkmanship. Troops are cheered eagerly to war but are soon dragged back from it. For 15 years since the end of the cold war, as Niall Ferguson points out in The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Washington’s interventionists have tried heavy handedly to police a “unipolar” world and mostly failed.

The British constitution is better suited to imperial outreach. It goes to war under prerogative and can ignore public opinion for years at a stretch. Neither Labour nor Conservative leaderships have reflected growing public scepticism about British policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Recent ICM and YouGov polls have registered dissatisfaction on all counts. The Tories, trapped by an internal neoconservative fifth column, even appear to favour bombing Iran.

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