Tony Blair has won in the Commons; now his fate is in the hands of the generals

For some reason Britain is always sunny on the outbreak of war. London basked under a heat-wave in August 1914 as Asquith almost casually condemned Britain to four years of slaughter. It was the same in September 1939. This week has seen a succession of cloudless spring days. I suppose there is always the remote hope that something will intervene, but it looks all but certain that bombs will be falling on Baghdad by the time these words are read.

It is a new kind of war, corresponding to the latest manifestation of American imperialism. Old-style US conservatives, like Henry Kissinger, were pessimists. They worked with the world as they found it, merely seeking to mould intractable materials as best they could to US interests. The new generation, like Donald Rumsfeld, take a more radical approach. This involves deciding what kind of world they would like, then creating it afresh. Rumsfeld and George Bush intend – as the US President’s ‘axis of evil’ speech made clear – that war in Iraq will be followed by an attack on North Korea, then Iran, then a pause for thought.

This new strategic doctrine has smashed, in an incredibly short space of time, the structures of the postwar era. Nato is broken. The only hope for the UN, supposing that the invasion of Iraq is successful, is to convert itself into an uncomplaining instrument of the United States. The new US policy, with its disregard for international institutions, shaky legality and ostentatious exercise of naked power, amounts to a transformation in the conduct of world affairs. That is why it is being resisted by, among others, the architects of the last Gulf war: George Bush Sr, Jim Baker, John Major, Douglas Hurd and virtually all the British foreign-policy establishment.