This is a brave new era for the modern media and we should embrace it with a cheer. Our lives are going to become a lot easier. This week, five years after the invasion of Iraq, we, as neutral observers are going to discuss its legacy in terms of success or failure. Can you believe that? Not only in this newspaper, but also in other publications, over the airwaves and on television, too. There will be a national meditation on whether invading Iraq was a good or bad thing.

Do you know what this means? It is party time. It is open season. All bets are off. No more moping around the house bereft of ideas. No more lying awake staring at the ceiling. No more turning on the radio in the small hours in the forlorn hope that one item, one caller will stir the faculties for argument from their coma.

Now the worst foreign policy mistake of post-1945 Western democracy is up for deliberation, it is fair to say that anything goes. Events through history that seemed fairly cut, dried and closed to examination can be revisited with an open mind. The Spanish Inquisition, perhaps, or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It is no longer required to debate only the debatable. If we can take an event in which everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, that has divided the world and made it more dangerous, if we can take something that has, indefinitely, increased the alienation of clans and races and say: “So, what do you reckon, did that suck or not?” then these really are high times for the wittering classes.

When Jerry Sadowitz posed the question on national television “Jews and Nazis, so who's right?” I thought he was joking. Not any more. In this climate so many events that were previously off limits can be reopened.

Iraq timeline: five years of conflict

From accusations that the weapons of mass destruction dossier had been sexed-up to withdrawal of British troops from Basra

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Lee Harvey Oswald: dangerous assassin or just keeping the powerful on their toes? The Jarrow marchers: shouldn't they stop moaning and do some work? Mahatma Gandhi: did the bastard have it coming to him? The siege of Stalingrad: how was it for you? Nelson Mandela: shouldn't life mean life?

Now, I am not saying that there is no place in debate for counterintuitive concepts. As a rule, I like them. To prove it, we could, right now, challenge the conventional wisdom surrounding the great reformer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mikhail Gorbachev.

OK, here goes. He became a candidate member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in September 1950, when Stalin was still in power. Do you think he talked much of his belief in demokratizatsya back then? Yet somehow he was promoted to first secretary of the Stavropol City Komsomol Committee in 1956, at the time of Khrushchev, and became head of the department of party organs in the Stavropol Agricultural Kraikom in 1963, no doubt all the time banging on about perestroika . Finally, under Brezhnev he became a representative of the Supreme Soviet in 1974, joined the Politburo in 1979 and probably didn't leave off about glasnost . I bet they lost count of the number of meetings in which just as the lads were sending the tanks in, Gorbachev stuck up his hand and said: “Do you know what also works, lads? Capitalism. Oh yes, blinding idea, freedom and democracy. That's definitely going to be the way forward when I'm in charge.”

So here is my theory. Having got the top job when Chernenko snuffed it, Gorby took one look at the books, worked out everyone was going to starve to death in about a fortnight, thought: “Right, stuff this, you can have Moldova back,” and went on from there. He was a pragmatist. He had to be because there is absolutely no way he could have risen through the ranks of one of the most politically repressive regimes of modern times while shouting the odds for democracy. Gorbachev was no visionary, merely a man of his time; he did what he thought he had to do and if he had not had to do it, he would have been just as oppressive as his predecessors. This, I concede, is not the popular view; but at least there is something to discuss beyond whether the move away from state-sponsored murder was good or bad for the people of Russia, which is where we appear to be with Iraq.

Ah, yes, but things are so much better for women in Iraq now. Try walking down the main drag in Basra in a short skirt and lippy, sunshine, then report back on that one.

If we remove this desire to acknowledge both sides of a moot argument, other issues become clearer, too. Barack Obama voted against the invasion of Iraq. Hillary Clinton did not. On the most important judgment call of the early 21st century, he was right and she was wrong. Any small changes in her stance have come now the calamity has unfolded, meaning that her shifting positions could be exploited by the Republicans as evidence of opportunism, a problem Obama would not have. See how it all falls into place?

You want a debate, though, we'll have a debate. Is the region safer? No. Is the world safer? No. Is the West safer? No. Are the Iraqi people safer? No. Have we made a bad situation worse? Yes. Has our international standing improved? No. Did we find any weapons? No. Did we find Osama bin Laden? No. Will it be over soon? No. Is it a recruitment poster for al-Qaeda? Yes. Did we at least get some cheap petrol out of it? No. Well, I think that about wraps it up for this one, folks. Read my lips. Worst. Decision. Ever. Now here's Jim with the travel.

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