DJ: But it wasn't a total catastrophe. They have just had another election now.

AR: That many people did not need to die, and wouldn't have done, had the post-war planning been done properly.

DJ: I'm sure that's true. But didn't everyone, including Blair's critics — and that includes Brown — underestimate what we were up against there? The Islamist uprising and the support they were getting from across the Muslim world was much greater than we reckoned. 

AR: But I think we should have reckoned, mea culpa. I'll take my responsibility as a journalist, I think journalism collectively was poor in asking enough questions about that and making too many assumptions — that the Americans and the British alongside them could do something as big as change the regime in a country with a population of 20 million people, that we would have thought properly about what we were going to do in the aftermath. Actually, it shouldn't have been underestimated. Jack Straw took an expert from the Foreign Office, Dr Michael Williams, along with him to one briefing with Tony Blair, and Dr Williams gave him a pretty detailed briefing on the sectarian tensions, the ethnic and religious tensions within Iraq, and why, given our history in that part of the world, America and Britain might not be terribly popular as occupiers. Blair just waved him off, "Well that's all history Mike, we're talking about the future." I think he and Bush were both far too blasé about that. 

General Mike Jackson, who was head of the army at the time, had a very useful doctrine: the doctrine of 100 days. If you're going to do this, you have about 100 days, not to establish a democracy, but to establish the rule of law, to make people feel safe and secure and to deliver basic services such as water and electricity. A lot of that post-war confidence was lost in that 100 days, because Rumsfeld and Franks disastrously tried to do it with too few troops and nobody had any plan. Blair has to accept some — not all — but some of the responsibility for that. 

DJ: Do you not think that, from the longer perspective of history, bringing democracy to Iraq and at least preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan — and we still don't know the outcome of that conflict — will nonetheless be judged more kindly than they are right now? 

AR: Iraq's a better place now than it would have been in the continuation of dictatorship of Saddam and his sons, absolutely. I never thought the anti-war people had all the moral arguments because they didn't.

NC: I'm very interested in where the British Left goes. Now, in foreign policy, it strikes me as a huge change not that people opposed the second Iraq war, but that, not just on the far-Left but even in the liberal mainstream, there is no feeling that you have to give support to those people in Iraq who've had 35 years of fascism. Al-Qaeda, a force that is from liberal nightmares, which is killing academics, which is killing trade unionists-you get no recognition of that anywhere now. That's why I'm quite worried about where liberal foreign policy goes after Labour gets out. It strikes me that liberalism is becoming if not little-England conservatism then little-Europe conservatism: we will build our Fortress Europe and we will keep our welfare states, and we won't intervene to help other people around the world.