Victor, I like to beat up on the Archbishop of Canterbury as much as the next neocon warmonger, but I was pleasantly surprised by his latest bon mot. It’s certainly anti-American but whatever else it is, it’s not “politically correct”. Hitherto, leftists have not been known for believing that the British poured “energy” and “resources” into “normalising” India. Whereas Harry Reid & Co want to bring the troops home within the first six months of a Hillary presidency, His Grace thinks they need to stay there nation-building through the first six decades of the 22nd century. His complaint on Iraq seems to be that a four-year occupation is tougher on the natives than a nice benign paternalistic four-century occupation.

In that sense, he’s closer to the snob anti-Americanism of my old colleague Sir Max Hastings, whose chief complaint about Afghanistan and Iraq is that the ghastly bloody Yanks make such frightfully vulgar imperialists; the Third Infantry Division simply lack the dash and elan of the Bengal Lancers, etc. Alternatively, to credit him with greater insight than he normally displays, the Archbishop may be siding with the Max Boot critique of the Bush Administration – that it needs to learn from the old Colonial Office a trick or two about training an overseas administrative class.

There are few takers for that, mainly because America doesn’t have an imperialist bone in its body. But the argument is still an important one. Since leaving the Administration, John Bolton, for one, has come out against nation-building: He likes to cite the then US Ambassador to the Court of St James’s distillation to the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, of American policy toward Mexico just under a century ago: Go in, whack the bad guy, hold an election, leave; Repeat as necessary.

My problem with this is that it’s not clear to me this even works in Mexico, never mind Mesopotamia. Indeed, taking the long view, it’s one reason why 75% of Mexico’s population is now living in your backyard in California.

Of course, the third explanation is that this is just the usual leftie shell game, and if Bush were to say, “You’re right, we need to stay there for another 200 years, and I’m making Max Boot the first viceroy”, the Archbishop would hitch up his cassock and recoil in horror.

(Imperial arcana: Did you know that in the Twenties the new British Mandate of Iraq was in fact administered by the India Office?)