Lions betrayed by donkeys

Don’t be silly,’ said my learned Tory friend Bruce, leaning across a plate of foie gras and peering at me over the top of his glasses. ‘It doesn’t matter whether they find any weapons of mass destruction; the war on Iraq was justified because it was fun. Our boys were getting bored; they needed a bit of a gallop.’

It looked, from the newspaper photographs, as though Bruce might be right. Covered in tribal face-paint and with skulls daubed on their helmets, our boys and America’s went whooping off in their tanks and planes. Cities fell, civilians looted, and patriots like Bruce knocked back a few bottles of port in celebration.

What happens to the heroes when they come home is a matter of less interest to military enthusiasts. It is a fact that hundreds of the squaddies whose progress we followed on 24-hour news channels will suffer trauma-related psychosis, and thousands will find life as a civilian so baffling and infuriating that they will end up homeless.