The lame-duck Bush bandwagon is still in denial about its abuse and misuse of intelligence when deciding to invade Iraq in 2003:

“We acted on the intelligence that we had, and that the entire world had,” spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters after Mr Rudd’s alleged “abuse of intelligence information” led to regime change in Baghdad.

“No-one else in the world, no other government, had different information and so we acted based on what was the threat that was presented to us.”

It’s a strange kind of zero-sum game when you invade foreign nations on the basis of dubious or thinly-extrapolated evidence of WMD, then argue ‘Well nobody had any evidence that there weren’t WMD…’ Apparently in this ludicrous new world order, you are likely to be invaded for possessing something unless someone else can prove that you don’t have it. And of course, no WMD were ever found, despite some flimsy and often deceitful attempts to suggest that stockpiles once existed and were somehow destroyed or spirited out of the country.

Hindsight and history will paint the Iraq War as a foreign policy folly of significant proportions. It has brought the deaths of 4,000 US soldiers, more than 1,000 civilian contractors and an inestimable number of Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians. It has cost the US in the region of $3 trillion at a time of economic decline and domestic need, such as Hurricane Katrina. The stabilisation of Iraq is now inextricably hinged to an American military presence that, once withdrawn, will see Iraq descend into a sectarian quagmire. There will be gross regional instability that will almost certainly draw in Iran, Syria, the northern Kurds and Turkey, not to mention remnant al Qaeda elements.

None of that belies the contribution of many elements of the multinational force, including the 14,000 Australians who have served in Iraq. It’s worth celebrating their thoughtful contribution in the wake of a thoughtless invasion. But it should also be acknowledged that Iraq is a patchwork of local, tribal and sectarian divisions – some more febrile and unstable than others – and that our zone in the south was considerably more manageable than Baghdad or those in north and central Iraq. We should be thankful because this has allowed us to withdraw without a single military death – but we should also recognise that it wasn’t only the professionalism of our soldiers that permitted this.

We are better off out of it and well clear of our fawning support for US action there, one of John Howard’s repugnant legacies. As for Iraq itself, Andrew Bolt might think the war is over, but I suspect it’s the ‘end of the beginning’ rather than the other way round.