“The whole area was quickly covered in debris,” he said, “There was a huge ball of smoke that mushroomed up It was mass hysteria.” He would know it when he sees it. Mr Ives and his wife, Sarah Khan, are both officers with the Metropolitan Police, and he had been on duty on 7 July, helping with traffic control in the aftermath of the London bombings. “People were trying to run in any direction to get away,” said one tourist, Fabio Basone, who had been in the Hard Rock Cafe when the first blast rocked the town. “We went into the street where we were met with hundreds of people running and screaming in all directions.” Charles Ives from Chelmsford, Essex, told of the utter confusion. Holiday town no longer, but a place where bodies and bits of bodies were strewn across roads and mixed with rubble, people screamed, sirens wailed, and no one knew where to run. By 1.28, each of those scenes and many of the people in them, had been ripped apart by three bombs in rapid succession.

In a square in the Old Town, taxi drivers wait in their cars as potential fares drink and mill about And on the promenade by the beach, tourists stroll

That was 1.14am. The early hours of Saturday morning in holiday town. In the lobby and coffee shop of Na’ama Bay’s Ghazala Gardens Hotel, people relax and plan what they’ll do tomorrow. Secretly they believed this was untrue and expected an easy victory.Now in 2005 they find to their horror that there are people in Iraq more truly dangerous than Saddam, and they are mired in an un-winnable conflict..

Ironically, the US and Britain pretended in 2003 that Saddam ruled a powerful state capable of menacing his neighbours. This may be useful propaganda at home but Iraqi government officials counter that London and Washington have no “course” in Iraq, only a policy of endless zig-zags.For future historians Iraq will probably replace Vietnam as the stock example of the truth of Wellington’s dictum about small wars escalating into big ones. The current motto of both governments is to “stay the course in Iraq”. But there are no cranes at work in Baghdad so the paper had been compelled to use a photograph of a crane which has been rusting for more than two years, abandoned at the site of a giant mosque that Saddam Hussein was constructing when he was overthrown.The same quality of make-believe mars British and American policy in Iraq.

Last week a pro-government newspaper had an article on the reconstruction of Baghdad. Above the article was a picture of a crane at a building site. On this occasion they had loaded coffins wrapped in Iraqi flags, containing the bodies of two of their officers murdered that morning, on to the backs of their pick-ups and were weaving through the traffic, firing over our heads. Drivers slammed on their brakes since people detained by the commandos, often for no known reason, are often found later in rubbish dumps, having been tortured and executed.The government, whose members seldom emerge from the Green Zone, make bizarre efforts to pretend that there are signs of a return to normality. This turned out to be the police commandos, a 12,000-strong paramilitary force which is meant to be the cutting edge of the government offensive against the insurgents. The last time I drove into west Baghdad from the airport in early July we were suddenly stopped by the sound of volleys of shots.