To my mind, this article is realistic but illustrates once again that the bottom line of American policy in Iraq is that America wants to do what's best for America and not what's best for Iraq.

This was true at the start of the war and is true now with the US trying desparately to extricate itself from the mess without making it look like a defeat.

It may well be that there is an overlap between what's best for the US and what's best for Iraq, but that's not necessarily so.

I know it might not be Realpolitik, but I can't see how, having broken Iraq, you can ever put it back together again without - first and foremost, really and truly - having the best interests of Iraqis at heart.

This was irresponsible. People have gone to great lengths to keep the contents of this book a secret, not least J.K.Rowling, and now you've just told an entire online community how to circumvent that, as well as leaking passages from the book.

I hope you're proud of yourselves.

And The Guardian reports today (http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2127115,00.html) that Dick Cheney favours military action against Iran before the end of Bush's presidency.

The proposed siting of missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic is a big issue here in Europe if not in the US. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, this comes along. Nobody, especially not Russia, believes that it's primarily to defend Europe against Middle Eastern threats, but is clearly aimed at Russia.

Not content with causing havoc in the Middle East, the US is now restarting the cold war with Russia and attempting to drive wedges between various European states.

The trouble is, it doesn't look as if there's much light at the end of the tunnel: none of the Democratic candidates for the presidency, for example, will publicly rule out war with Iran, nor risk any criticism of America's one-sided and counter-productive 'policy' towards Israel and the Palestinians.

Gloom.

In Britain, Blair's view is very much a minority one.

He began to lose touch with reality during the build-up to the Iraq war. I remember in 2003 newspaper columnists predicting that the sheer folly of the rush to war marked the beginning of the end of Blair. And so it proved. Till then, he'd been respected (if not necessarily liked) in Britain and elsewhere.

Now, with just weeks left in office, he's desparately trying to talk up his 'legacy'. But it's too late. Even his supporters admit that he will be forever tarnished by the Iraq debacle.

A number of letters have suggested that Kamiya is too harsh on Americans as it's not something in their psyche that has allowed Bush a clear run, but the fact that they have been consistently lied to by the government and abominably served by a supine mainstream media.

But to me, that view sounds like another trait Americans have been accused of - a reluctance to accept responsibility for their actions.

It is of course true about the lies and the mainstream media, but it's also true that you get the media you deserve. All those millions of people lapping up Fox News' 'reporting' WANTED to believe what they were being told and Fox News duly told them what they wanted to hear.

Americans don't seem to have the cynicism of many Western Europeans. This has its advantages but it also means that there is little willingness to re-examine cherished beliefs about the myth of America, and therefore news organizations don't provide that analysis. And many Americans therefore don't have a functioning mental model of how the world works.

The shock of this sort of behaviour is not so much that it's happening at all but rather that, despite recently tightened legislation, the CIA and others are absolutely determined to carry on torturing using any method they think they can get away with and hiding behind various legal formulations such as narrowly-defined definitions of torture.

In other words, they think it's absolutely fine to torture the bad guys as long as they don't get found out (by using Black Sites and keeping the Red Cross away, for example).

I don't know about you, but I'm appalled by this. Maybe I don't live in the 'real world' where this sort of brutalization (of the torturers as well as the tortured) is a necessary tool in The War On Terror, but this is also sending clear signals to America's enemies: you know what you can expect if captured by the US, and thus in their own eyes it validates any brutality they might inflict on captured Americans.

Kosovo was primarily a peacekeeping operation. The UN and others didn't just go in guns blazing to take out the bad guys. It wasn't even clear who the bad guys were, just that innocent civilians were being killed on all sides.

The Kosovan operation was supported by the UN, Nato, the EU, the US, and others. Iraq was a rogue operation carried out by the US, with Britain hanging onto its coat-tails, against the wishes of the UN and most of the rest of the world.

Whatever you think of the methods used in Kosovo, they worked. It has been peaceful for years. If the Iraq approach had been used then God knows where we'd be now.

Even if you think the British royal family are a bunch of in-bred anachronisms, the Queen is a visiting head of state and has every right to expect to be treated courteously and with respect.

If the roles were reversed, Bush would quite rightly expect to be treated by his British hosts with all the respect due to a President of the United States, regardless of the fact that, to put it mildly, he's not well-liked in the UK.