IN SATURDAY’S Times there was a perceptive and important article from Gerard Baker on the American reaction to reports of the massacre at al-Haditha. His conclusion was that “there is a gathering sense that the outrages of al-Haditha and elsewhere are not just simply isolated examples of bad behaviour but the almost inevitable consequence of deploying the US military to a task for which it is ill-equipped and poorly trained — policing and pacifying an alien people”.

Baker backed this with a telling quotation from Foreign Affairs, the specialist magazine of the foreign policy community. The article was published in 2000, before 9/11 had changed American thinking. “The President must remember that the military is a special instrument. It is lethal, and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian police force. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.” Who was the author? It was Condoleezza Rice, who was foreign policy adviser to George Bush, then a Republican candidate for the presidency. She is now the Secretary of State.

The State Department was never converted to the neoconservative policies of Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, and of the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld. During Bush’s first term as President, Colin Powell was Secretary of State. He was too loyal — some would say too weak — to win the State Department’s traditional turf battle with the Pentagon. US foreign policy was largely determined by the advice that Cheney-Rumsfeld team gave to the President. Perhaps inevitably, Condoleezza Rice was compliant with that advice, but there is no reason to think she changed her underlying view of policy.

The State Department has now regained control of foreign policy. That is evident from the change of policy over Iran. The neoconservatives, and Rumsfeld himself, wanted to use military pressure to make Iran accept US policy on non-proliferation. The State Department and Condoleezza Rice herself seem to share the view expressed by Jack Straw that it would be “nuts” to bomb Tehran. Of course, the State Department has long taken the view that Rumsfeld is nuts. The President decided to support the department’s line, and negotiate. This is an historic change in the direction of sanity. The Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns are difficult enough; oil at $70 a barrel is expensive enough. The price for bombing Iran would be a third war in the Middle East and oil at $150 a barrel — let alone the likely reaction of the Shia in Iraq.

In business, companies usually change their fundamental policies because they are losing money, not just because someone has had a bright idea. It is the same in government. Policies can continue unchanged for a long time, even when they are failing, but they are soon changed when votes are being lost. The President is in danger of losing the mid-term elections next November. If he loses control of either House of Congress, let alone both, he will not only become a lame duck; the Republican Party will become a plucked, drawn and stuffed duck ready for the oven. The oven will be the presidential election of 2008.

The Democrats are hungry for their opportunity. Last week, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the proprietor of The New York Times, made a radical left-wing attack on the President in a graduation speech to a local college.

The majority of American journalists, not only those at The New York Times, hold similar “liberal” views. Liberal in the United States means left wing. As a result of this, the Republican Party is more vulnerable to media opinion than are the Democrats.

Liberals were going to vote for Democratic candidates for the House and Senate in any case. The significant change is that more Democrats seem to be feeling more liberal than at any time since Vietnam. This is not good news for Hillary Clinton in her campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008. The Clintons have always been centrist Democrats. Indeed, that was how Bill Clinton won the nomination and the presidency; his policy of “triangulation” made him a mentor for Tony Blair.

Gerard Baker reports a reaction that is more important but less expected that the outrage of liberal Democrats. It is easy to forget that those who mind most about the honour of the US Army are those who serve in the Army, or belong to army families. It is their honour that is under attack. For the proprietor of The NewYork Times, the massacre at al-Haditha is a journalistic and political scandal. It is much more than that to the wife of a soldier who is risking his life in Iraq.

In political terms — presidents have no choice but to see the world in political terms — loss of the confidence of army families would be a serious set-back. The Republicans in the Nixon period developed the Southern strategy that helped them to win seven out of the last ten presidential elections. They hold 18 out of 22 southern seats in the Senate. The South is the region with the strongest military tradition and the largest number of army families. If the Republicans lose ground in South they will not win national elections.

It goes wider than that. The war in Iraq was “won” three years ago. Yet it seems no nearer to a conclusion now than it was then. Most of its early supporters recognise that there was a disastrous failure to plan for the aftermath of victory, and beyond that a failure to develop an exit strategy. The people who have most reason to resent these failures are not the critics at home, but the soldiers out in Iraq or Afghanistan fighting wars that offer no prospect of a solution.

That frustration, as well as al-Haditha, is undermining the morale of the army families; it is undermining the families’ earlier confidence in President Bush. Army people are very loyal, but that makes them only more likely to resent exploitation of their loyalty by either party.

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