The general is making a local contribution to a global debate whose focal point is not London but Washington. If he had not intervened, this debate might have been entirely decided inside the Washington beltway, with almost no contribution from Britain. The global strategy of the Western alliance is already under review in Washington — Britain will play an important part in executing that strategy, and certainly ought to have a voice in framing it.

Unfortunately, we hardly have a Government at present; certainly the Government has disgracefully little decision-making capacity. The Prime Minister is a lame duck, with hardly a quack left in him; the Foreign Secretary is Margaret Beckett; the Secretary for Defence is Des Browne; the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is the heir presumptive, “does not do wars”. Britain has no national voice; indeed the Government has no real national mind.

Clearly, the United States is the main power. Nevertheless, it is essential to British interests that Britain should join in the discussion. There obviously was a serious strategic failure in Iraq after the original military victory. On this point General Dannatt’s critique is almost universally accepted. Tony Blair shares responsibility for that failure, but the three men who have the greatest share of responsibility are President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence.

The President gave the post-war responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq to the Pentagon under Mr Rumsfeld rather than the State Department under Colin Powell. He preferred the unqualified and, in this respect, the incompetent department. Mr Cheney backed that disastrous choice. Mr Rumsfeld failed on the job. It is not reasonable to ask the British people to accept whatever new strategy for Iraq is chosen by these men. Those of us who believe in the Anglo-American alliance, and have always believed in it, must take this point. Just as General Dannatt has cautioned that the Army could be broken in Iraq, so we must face the danger that the alliance could be broken. The Bush Administration has treated the US-UK alliance with supercilious negligence, if not with outright arrogance. As a result, the United States is more unpopular in Britain than at any time in my life. This needs to be put right, and it can be put right only by frank consultation.

The opportunity could arise after the mid-term US elections on November 2. The polls are volatile, so one cannot make a confident prediction, but the Republicans are in deep trouble, both in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Some polls do suggest that there will be an “earthquake”; it seems more likely than not that the Democrats will win control of one or both Houses. The Republicans are unpopular partly because Iraq is an unpopular war, but also because of the financial and sexual scandals that are affecting individual congressmen. The President is in his last years of office; that is always a weak position for US presidents, as it is for Mr Blair.

There is widespread discussion in America of the future strategy for Iraq, both in private and in public. This is overdue. The Democrats are swinging against the Iraq war. It now seems unlikely that a pro-war candidate, such as Hillary Clinton has been, can win the Democratic primaries in 2008. In the Connecticut primary for this year’s Senate race, Senator Joseph Lieberman, the vice-presidential candidate in the 2000 election, was defeated by an antiwar millionaire from Greenwich. If the Democrats win either House, there will be a direct political conflict on the future of the war between Congress and the President.

Partly as a result of this political pressure, the Republicans are facing up to the need for a new Iraq strategy, which is what the British Army wants. That was the real underlying theme of General Dannatt’s interview. As I was discussing last week, John Warner, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has said that there would have to be “a change of course” in the Iraq strategy. He is an important figure in the Washington defence establishment. He would not have called for a change if he did not know there would actually be one.

Even more influential is James Baker, the Secretary of State in the Administration of George Bush Sr. Baker is chairing a commission on Iraq that will report shortly. He is a Republican and a Bush loyalist. He was an excellent Secretary of State, one of the ablest servants of the US Government in the last decades of the 20th century. If anyone can devise a new strategy for Iraq, he would be the man.

There is no going back to the more promising situation of 2003, immediately after the military victory. At that time the Iraqis might have accepted the Americans if the US regime had managed a successful reconstruction programme. That did not happen. All foreign troops are now deeply resented. There are, however, always the realities of power. The Shia do have a national majority and a predominant majority in the south; the Kurds have a majority in the north; Iraq is still an oil-rich country; Baghdad is a major city. From these realities a new political balance will eventually emerge. Utopian schemes for imposing democracy are a fantasy.

Both the American and the British armies are overstretched. Neither army has spare capacity to increase the number of troops in Iraq. Neither army has additional capacity to impose order, or to disarm the militias, even if that was the preferred course.

President Bush will have to come to terms with these real Iraqi forces and with the Democrats in the next US Congress. The British Army wants to have decisions from the British Government. The era of strategic confusion must be brought to an end.

Times Recommends

• Ted Hughes was a prophet of climate change
• Health & safety can damage your reasoning
• It’s Big Brother’s stupidity that scares me