Like a good novelist who wishes to inject verisimilitude into his fiction, President George W. Bush, US president, began his speech on Iraq with a reference to a historical fact all too tragically well known to his audience. The evocation of the monstrous crime of September 11 2001 served as his introduction to the fictional spin that then followed: that Iraq was complicit in 9/11 and thus, in effect, attacked the US; that the US has had no choice but to defend itself against Iraq’s aggression; and, finally, that if America does not fight terrorists in Iraq, they Iraqi terrorists will swarm across the ocean to attack America. and hence it is better to fight them there.

Since fiction is not ruled by the same standards as history, Mr Bush was under no obligation to refer to his own earlier certitude about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” (or, rather, to their embarrassing absence), nor or to the inept sequel of the initially successful US military campaign; nor or to the fact that the ongoing occupation of Iraq is turning it the country into a huge recruitingrecruitment centre for anti-American potential terrorists. Similarly, there was no need to deal with any degree of specificity with the increasingly perplexing fact that the Iraqi insurgency does not appear to be in “its last throes”, nor or with the complex political and military choices that the US now confronts.