Mary Dejevsky: Where is our national soul-searching on Iraq?

Americans are engaged in an extended bout of national soul-searching as only Americans know how. From investigative books, through television and radio talk-shows, via the comment columns of major newspapers, right up to Congressional committees, everyone has a view and wants a say. The subject, of course, is Iraq, and the popular consensus - such as there is one - is summed up in the title of Thomas Ricks's book Fiasco.

But the discussion does not stop at despairing introspection. Americans want to know how and why their country ended up in this mess on the other side of the world. Was it just that wrong decisions were taken along the way, or was the whole venture doomed from the start? Were the mistakes military, political or ideological, or a fatal concatenation of all three? Most of all, Americans want to know what is to be done about it.

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The chief architects of the policy - Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld - have left the administration. But the President and Vice-President are still there; George Bush half-heartedly admits that the buck stops with him. This is why he is risking one last gamble (and thousands of American lives) to bring security to Baghdad - and why those voters who demolished the Republicans' Congressional majorities last November are so furious with him. That, in turn, is why they marched through Washington last weekend and why Jane Fonda was back at the microphone in magnificent anti-war mode.

Viewed from this side of the Atlantic, the ferment in the United States is as stimulating and enviable as always. But why, given that our country was complicit in the invasion, given that thousands of British troops are still there, given that the Iraq débâcle is ours as well as theirs, why are we not in the throes of a similar discussion? Why was last week's parliamentary debate such a damp squib? Why has so much of the fight gone out of the anti-war constituency?

Two explanations can be jettisoned at the outset. It is not a matter of national character. We are just as capable of manifesting popular dissent as Americans. We were out on the streets registering our opposition before the war even began. The columns of our newspapers seethed with defiance. Even the BBC got into trouble for lack of esprit de corps.

Nor - and I find this suggestion as patronising as it is ill-conceived - is it that we "opinion-formers" have been intimidated by accusations of treachery and bamboozled by appeals to our patriotism. Let's get this straight. It was the US where the bulk of the intellectual establishment suppressed its doubts about the war for the sake of uncritical post-9/11 patriotism. It was the US where public opinion recorded 80 per cent approval for the invasion of Iraq. And it was American journalism that was steamrollered by the patriotic card - and, in the case of The New York Times, belatedly repented.

The grass-roots debate that raged in Britain before the troops went into Iraq had much in common with the argument that has erupted in the US today. There was similar spontaneity and similar anger. "We, the people" were furious that "they, the Government" would not listen. Indeed, the slanging match we engaged in before the war may be one reason why there is hardly a whisper of debate now. We got the raw fury out of our system early.

But there are other reasons for the difference in mood between the two sides of the Atlantic. The first is that the US has many times more troops in Iraq than we have, and has suffered disproportionately more casualties. This has kept the war in the news; it has also placed the end-game, and specifically troop withdrawal, on the agenda in a way that has not really happened here.

The second is that the ascendancy of the US anti-war constituency has been validated by the mid-term elections. Like it or not, British voters returned Labour to government in 2005. The single issue of the war reduced Labour's majority, but was not sufficient to topple the Government. Mr Blair is wrong if he believes the result gave him a retrospective mandate for the war, but the anti-war message would never resound as loudly after the election as it did before.

There are two other reasons, however, why the mood in Britain is more sullen than rebellious. The first is that, one way or another, the demands of the anti-war coalition are being met. Most of the war's intellectual proponents, and many politicians, have either recanted or accepted that the result is a catastrophe. There are many fewer British troops in Iraq than there were at the start - no more, in fact, than are now in Afghanistan. And for presentational purposes, British officials act as though the "war" is a US venture, whereas what we are about is something quite different. No joint British-US operation in Iraq has been publicised since the costly troop transfer of Christmas 2005, and the planned US "surge" is not our problem. As for a British troop withdrawal, ministers increasingly say it is not whether, but when. There is no sense to a debate if the other side agrees with all you say.

The other reason why the debate here has shut down is that the one person who still appears not to agree has ignobly left the field. The Prime Minister no longer even tries to defend the war he led us into with such messianic purpose. There is a debate in America because George Bush, to his foolhardy credit, has not given up talking back.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk

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