There, perhaps, the commentary should rest. But too many years listening to politicians in private as well as in public teach me that, behind closed doors in Westminster and Washington, this is not where commentary will rest. Of course Tony Blair’s and George W. Bush’s shock will be as genuine as that of any other human being; it will have been instinctive. But they are politicians as well as human beings, and after the instinct will have come the calculation. How (Mr Blair will be asking himself this weekend) will these horrors play with the British voter? Whom will the public blame? Popular disgust we can take for granted, but in the “War on Terror”, will disgust bring a stiffening of the sinews, or a nervous wobble?

In these political leaders’ minds a small shaft of what in less grisly circumstances one might call hope breaks through. Surely in the Western imagination this atrocity puts the Iraqi insurgents so far beyond the pale that public anger in Britain steels a national determination to see this war through to victory? Surely even a woolly-minded liberal who has felt sympathy for the insurgents’ cause, if not their methods, will now see these terrorists for the animals they are? Being abroad I do not know whether any of my fellow columnists or leader writers in Fleet Street have yet written that column. But they will.

And they will be spitting into the wind. Spitting as valiantly as they have spat since this conflict began.

Let me explain why. It all starts from the word “crude”. To describe the approach of those of us who have from the start opposed this war, “crude” has been a favourite term among Pentagon cheerleaders on both sides of the Atlantic. I used to resent it, but I am beginning to think we should embrace it.

When, after 9/11, we warned America against any lashing out in ill-directed rage, we were accused of a “crude” distortion of US strategy. When as war looked increasingly inevitable we worried aloud about the Pentagon’s approach, we were charged with pandering to “crude” anti-Americanism.

When, as Washington worked on plans for the handover of “sovereignty” in Iraq, we recalled the time-honoured fate of puppet governments, we were accused of making “crude” comparisons with South Vietnam. And when we deplored our own Prime Minister’s too-ready compliance with the wishes of an American president, we were said to have painted a “crude” caricature of dog owner and poodle.

Very well, then, I thought: if not a crude case for paralysis, how about a thoughtful case for inactivity? If not crude anti-Americanism, how about some sophisticated anti-Americanism. If not a crude comparison with South Vietnam, how about an erudite one? If not a crude caricature of dog owner and dog, how about a delicate portrait of that most trusting of relationships?

But then again, why bother? Perhaps we who have opposed this stupendous blunder should come out of the closet and proclaim ourselves proud to have been crude. As Lord Melbourne once lamented: “What all the wise men said would happen has not happened, and what all the damn fools predicted has occurred.”

And so it has come to pass in Iraq. The damn fools said America would lash out, and America did. The damn fools said it would only make terrorism worse, and it has. The damn fools said America would prove a mulish occupying power, and America did. The damn fools said Mr Blair would exert little or no influence on Mr Bush, and nor has he. The damn fools said things would get worse, not better, once power was handed to a puppet government in Iraq, and things have.

So where from here? There follows a damn fool’s judgement — mine — about the likely subliminal popular reaction to this week’s instalment of barbarism in Iraq: the quiet and mostly unspoken reaction behind all the headline screams of fury and disgust.

It is that we should never have got ourselves into this in the first place. It is that we — not those poor dead hostages, but the Government we have elected which effectively sent them there — were “asking for it”. Now how crude is that?

So crude that, like many sentiments in which there is a sharp splinter of truth, it hurts to read it and it hurts to write it. “Asking for it” expresses a thought which is callous and unfair on so many counts and which, taken literally, is plain wrong; yet which will have occurred to tens of millions of my fellow citizens this week — though few would try to justify it if challenged, and fewer still would dream of expressing in so many words.

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