There was some “unfair stuff”, he recalled in a speech last week but “Jeb didn’t whine about it, he didn’t complain”. Then Bush began to sob. As he struggled to continue, he said haltingly, “A true measure of a man is how you handle victory and how you handle defeat”, before breaking down in tears again.

There were just two days to go before the release of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker, Papa Bush’s old friend and secretary of state.

Only last month Bush Sr was being hailed for riding to the rescue of his elder son, George W, after the Republicans’ bruising defeat in the midterm elections.

He had offered up Robert Gates, his former CIA director, to replace Donald Rumsfeld as defence secretary, and now Baker was to reveal his plan for saving America’s face in Iraq.

Perhaps more than anyone, Bush Sr knew that the Iraq Study Group was not going to offer much of a panacea — for the very reason that he had refused to enter Baghdad after his own victory against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War: there was never going to be an easy way out.

“No one who knows George H W Bush thinks that moment (when he cried) was only about Jeb,” said Peggy Noonan, one of his former speechwriters.

“It wasn’t only about some small defeat a dozen years ago. It would more likely to have been about a number of things and another son.”

Within a day of the publication of the Iraq Study Group report its recommendations were already being unpicked.

Its call for US troops to switch to a supporting role in Iraq and for nearly all combat brigades to be removed by early 2008 is a “recipe that will lead to our defeat”, warned Senator John McCain, a favourite for the Republicans’ 2008 presidential nomination. The panel’s “wise men” were derided as “surrender monkeys” on the front page of the New York Post.

The panel’s second big idea — a grand bargain involving direct talks with Iran and Syria as well as Arab-Israeli peace negotiations — depends on so many conditions being met by so many parties that it is regarded by many analysts as optimistic.

In any case, the second President George Bush showed no indication at his White House press conference last Thursday that he was buying it. The Syrians and Iranians need not “bother to show up” for talks unless they were serious about restraining terrorism, he said.

As today’s Sunday Times disclosure of secret talks with insurgent leaders shows, other recommendations — such as negotiations with rebels, an attempt at national reconciliation and proposals for de-Ba’athification and talks with Iran have been considered before, to no avail.

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