Iraq will probably slide further into civil war, hastening the establishment of de facto protectorates inside the legal fiction of an Iraqi state. Iran will look after the Shi'ite south. Syria's protectorate will be the Sunni west (despite the confusing fact that its regime elite belong to a secularised Shi'ite sect), and . . . who knows . . . be allowed to re-enter Lebanon. The Kurdish north, largely running its own affairs since 1991, will remain autonomous under the protection of the US. Mixed Baghdad will make 1991 Sarajevo look like a Benetton poster of peaceful tolerance.

Three years ago the war to establish a showhouse democracy in Iraq was already lost and with it the possibility of the West ending 60 years of paying off corrupt Middle Eastern regimes with oil money. But it didn't look that way at the time.

After the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, even the war's fiercest opponents were forced to concede that . . . despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction . . . the forecasted sandy Stalingrad looked like so much lefty fantasy.

The broken tyrant blinking out of the dark hole in which he'd hidden, surrendering his loaded but unused pistol, seemed to signal final victory.

Stung by the apparent effortlessness of the US victory in Iraq, Libya quietly gave up a quite real nuclear weapons programme. The UN approved the occupation. Saudi Arabia made moves towards local elections. Syria pulled its uniformed troops out of Lebanon.

Iran's pro-Western student movement was blogging to freedom. Iraq, despite fits and starts, was moving messily towards three separate elections. Momentum rushed toward the neocon best of all possible worlds in the Middle East, which would, after some turbulence, be on the path to democratic reform. We'd see regimes emerge that would finally address the real causes of chronic underperformance of Arab areas, as spelled out in the 2002 UN Development Report . . . not an Israeli/Western conspiracy to keep them down but because, first amongst many factors, most Arab societies ignored the capacity of women to produce anything other than children.

Opponents of the war were stunned. This was not the narrative they signed up for at the march on 15 February 2003.

Where was the disaster?

"I have changed my mind about the illegitimacy of a war solely on the basis that, inevitably, it will result in the loss of innocent life, " wrote Vincent Browne, in an intellectually generous Irish Times column on 28 July 2004.

"I and others were certainly wrong about the scale of the disaster that would ensue from an American invasion.

Sure, the aftermath of the conflict has been worse than the Americans themselves predicted, but the anti-war predictions of hundreds of thousands of fatalities have proved hugely exaggerated."

Granted, Browne clarified the following week that he was not, in fact, retrospectively endorsing the war. But consider . . . Browne's column came a full three months after the devastating revelations of prisoner humiliation and abuse by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

Even into the 2004 US election, Iraq looked like a mess, but one that was still justified by apparent success.

As Washington Post writer Thomas Ricks details in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, US tactics were already helping create the conditions for insurgency and civil war weeks after the fall of Baghdad.

The very same unit that captured Saddam Hussein was sweeping through villages in the 'Sunni triangle' west of Baghdad. Unable to distinguish between insurgents and innocents, whole towns were "cleared" and marched out of their homes at gunpoint.

Worse, as Rajiv Chandrasekaran, then Baghdad bureau chief for the Post, reveals in his new book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City:

Inside Iraq's Green Zone, the US occupation administration was run by deluded caricature ideologues so incompetent they seem dreamt up by scriptwriters on The Simpsons.

None of this, of course, was as clear then as it is now. The war's opponents have the disaster they fantasised about, delivered by the fantasies of the war's architects.