America is still the nation whose eyes say ‘yes’

Douglas Murray tours a country despondent about its presidential race and increasingly uncertain about Barack Obama. Yet the world still needs America’s strengths

In front of me at the University of Chicago, and several times my height, is a stone carving of a half-human deity from the Assyrian empire. All round this exhibition on ancient Iraq are towering artefacts from lost cities and faded empires. The whole is overshadowed by a room featuring the Baghdad looting of 2003. Beside me, a father tries to answer a question from his son: ‘What happened to Babylon?’ The father attempts to explain how empires ebb and flow — how armies rise and fall.

The fall of empires was already on my mind because I had come from Washington where I had been with some of the people now perennially described as the ‘architects’ of the Iraq war. It was not only being with those now out of the Bush administration that created a state of dejection in the air.