I didn’t get any reply to my offer of a drink with Nick, perhaps because I teased him about being wrong about the war – nobly wrong, perhaps, wrong from admirable motives – but still completely and utterly shit-faced wrong about the consequences of the invasion.

I wouldn’t have thought this was controversial. Practically everyone agrees that nuclear-armed theocracies are a very bad thing, which should so far as possible be discouraged, using force or the threat of force if necessary. Has the invasion of Iraq made it easier for Britain to discourage Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Has it made the threat of force more credible?

The answer is obviously and powerfully that it has had the opposite effect. Instead we now have an army large enough to serve as a hostage, but not large enough to defeat its enemies, stranded in the middle of a huge area run by forces loyal to Iran. If the Americans or anyone else bomb Iran’s nuclear plants, it is the British Army which will bear the immediate brunt of retaliation. This is not actually the fault of the antiwar left.

But the important thing about Nick’s wrongness is that the world would be a better place if he were right. His moral compass is not deficient: it’s just his moral map shows a huge continent that doesn’t in fact exist. He sees that both fascism and theocracy are wicked systems, antagonistic to the human spirit. So, he says, we should support the decent liberal secular Arabs who care about human rights. No argument here, either. But what matters, in Iraq, is whom the Iraqis support, and if we look at the last election the "Nick Cohen list", as you might call it, was simply wiped out. Offered a reasonably free and full democratic choice, including liberal secularism and women’s rights, Iraqis voted in their millions for either theocracy or fascism instead; if Kurds, they voted not to be Iraqi at all.

This seems to me to make final nonsense of any kind of idealistic leftist defence of the war. It’s cheap and obvious to point out that the Bush gang would only install an honest and efficient government by accident. It’s also true, but that wouldn’t in itself be a conclusive argument against liberal imperialism. The accident might happen. The invaded country might demand it. But when you have an invading army that doesn’t care about good government, and an invaded country that doesn’t care for it, the liberal imperialist project can only discredit liberalism and imperialism both. I don’t see how that can be regarded as a triumph for the decent left.