In a way, these are two halves of the same coin: the analyst who is in denial, who insists on a law that is inappropriate; and the practitioner who throws the law away because it’s inappropriate. I say these two views are self-destructive because they take away our greatest prop, our greatest tool. One of the things I hope will come out of the war on terror is a greater appreciation of the rule of law as a political objective. When you find you are no longer fighting wars to seize territory, to capture resources, to convert people to your ideological point of view or religious sect, I think you’ll find that the objective of warfare, the war aim, is the protection of civilians and I believe that civilians cannot be protected without the rule of law. It is as indispensable to the protection of civilians as, I don’t know, hygiene is to a hospital. You can get everything else right, you can get the best surgeons, the best analysts and you can get the diagnoses spot on but if the environment is polluted and toxic you are still going to lose the patient.

MG: You said that was the most telling criticism of the allies in Iraq. Whatever the arguments about intervention and whatever the arguments about international law that governs intervention in cases like this, we didn’t think enough about putting in place institutions that guaranteed the rule of law for people who had been living without it for 30 years.

PB: It is certainly a telling criticism and one that was so unnecessary. We think of victory as winning, victory in the football game, victory in the chess match, I win, you lose, you win, I lose, right? But victory in warfare is not simply a matter of winning. Victory in warfare is a matter of achieving the war aim. You can win victory on the battlefield and still lose the war aim and you can sometimes have a defeat in battle, as we did in the War of 1812, and still achieve most of your war aims. So in Iraq one of our war aims ought to have been the reintroduction of the rule of law. Losing sight of that meant that we could win a dazzling battlefield victory and still lose the war – and we damn near did lose the war.

MG: The balancing thing I should say now, I suppose, is that it was Churchill who said that “America always does the right thing after it’s exhausted every other possibility”. I now think it’s fair to say that, partly driven by the personality of General Petraeus, partly driven by the assumption of greater responsibility by Iraqi political leaders themselves, we are now moving into – I would hesitate to say a more benign – but certainly a much more optimistic set of circumstances for Iraq in terms of institutions that we’re building there. Would you agree?