So Saddam's Baghdad has 'fallen' to the Americans without them even taking the city - in the same sense that a feeble old man might fall over his own walking stick at the first puff of wind.
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The coalition's hollow victory in Baghdad marks a fittingly surreal climax to a war that was always empty of meaning. Saddam's regime has simply imploded like the wretched, ruined state that any objective observer of Iraqi affairs knew it to be. The US and UK authorities claim that a powerful regime has been brought down by their well-paced, patient prosecution of the war over the past three weeks. In reality, we can now see that the enfeebled Iraqi state all but collapsed the moment the coalition forces rolled across its borders.
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Was there a war at all? There were certainly plenty of bombs dropped, guns fired and Iraqis killed by the American and British forces. But there has not been one single clash with Iraqi forces that could remotely be described as a battle. Compared to the major wars of the past, the entire campaign adds up to little more than an extended skirmish. The Big Battle to Come was always the one just around the corner - in Basra, or Baghdad, or Tikrit - that somehow never quite came.
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The 'surprisingly stiff resistance' that coalition forces claimed to be facing from a few irregulars at various times over the past three weeks has been largely a product of their own anxious imagination. By the time of the first armoured raid into Baghdad last weekend, the coalition seemed to be wildly exaggerating the scale of Iraqi military casualties, almost as if to prove that there really had been a proper fight. 'One thousand' killed in a three-hour shooting trip along a Baghdad boulevard quickly became 'two thousand' or more. Who was counting?
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But then, remember, this was supposed to be a war against a dictator who held the world to ransom, a regime the like of which, according to the Pentagon only last week, 'the world has not ever seen before'. Having launched a war on the risible basis that Saddam the tinpot dictator was a bigger monster than Stalin and Hitler, they could hardly afford to admit that he had turned out to be a pantomime villain with a cardboard army.
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Now there is a worried debate about what might constitute victory in a war that never was. This reflects an ongoing deep uncertainty about what the coalition's ever-shifting war aims were meant to be: destroying weapons of mass destruction that nobody can find, liberating Iraq from its own government, or simply killing Saddam? With what one commentator calls 'a definitive, iconic ending' (like say, Saddam's head on a pole) proving illusive, coalition commanders now talk vaguely of a 'rolling victory'.
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 | | The war has shown that the politics of spin can come out of the barrel of a gun
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Lacking any substance, the war has been all about image. On the eve of launching the invasion, coalition leaders fantasised about broadcasting instant television pictures of Basra residents welcoming British troops with open arms because they believed, in the words of a US marine commander, that 'the first image of this war will define the conflict'.
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Since then, as Brendan O'Neill has catalogued on spiked, the battlefield has been littered with armed stunts and gestures designed to project an image and create what commanders call 'effects' - from the psycho-pyrotechnics of the 'shock and awe' bombings, to the made-for-TV rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, to the ostentatious demolition of statues of Saddam.
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Those who would draw a line between the shallow politics of spin at home and this real battle of conviction politics in Iraq are missing the mark. In a sense, the war has shown that the politics of spin can come out of the barrel of a gun.
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Meanwhile, in Baghdad and Basra, the streets are filled with looters rather than Iraqi freedom fighters. The promised popular uprising proved as illusory as the 'elite' Republican Guard. History shows that when people rise up and liberate themselves from tyranny, it creates a new sense of social solidarity and empowerment. But when they are 'liberated' by foreign powers, as if they were helpless children being snatched from an abuser, it leaves little more than a vacuum and a deep sense of powerlessness.
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The vacuum at the centre of Iraqi society, like the bomb craters in Baghdad, reveals the hole at the heart of the Bush-Blair war.
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Mick Hume is editor of spiked.
Read on:
Rewriting Basra, by Brendan O'Neill
spiked-issue: War on Iraq
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