Three new books on the Iraq war

The narrative is leavened with Stothard’s understated humour. Blair wonders how to being his we-are-at-war-address. “My fellow Americans,” suggests his spin chief Alastair Campbell!

Not quite the second draft of history, this is a seamless narrative spun out of reports and analyses by Guardian journalists in the prelude and during the invasion of Iraq.

The title, of course, betrays the writers’ position on the battle for Mesopotamia. The terrible irony of warfare comes across from recollections of little moments which may have been forgotten in the subsequent whirl of despatches from embedded reporters.

For instance: “The first confirmed casualty of Operation Iraqi Freedom was neither Iraqi nor even British. Ahmed al-Baz was a Jordanian taxi driver on the busy road from Baghdad to Amman. Nobody knows if he had time to be scared.” Or 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas, maimed icon of the senselessness of violence, who pleads: “Doctor, doctor, no more journalists please.”

Hitchens famously broke rank with leftists after September 11 by endorsing the attack on Taliban-held Afghanistan.

In retrospect, this reassessment of his position on military intervention and war only added bite to his rousing polemics. Collected in this volume are his columns for the website Slate on the Second Gulf War.

“The idea,” he writes, “was to test short-term analyses against longer-term ones, while simultaneously subjecting long-term positions or convictions to shorter-term challenges.” If you want to read just one book on the recent war, Regime Change should be the one.