The discussion about Iraq currently under way here is not really about Iraq. Nor is it about the Middle East. Nor is it particularly about the morality of war. It is about the nature and substance of political authority in the West, writes John Waters.
At least as vital as the battle for Iraq is the one for the heart and mind of Western culture, for which the war is largely a shadow-play.
The public conversations of many Western societies now exhibit a mutant brand of throwback rebelliousness that desperately requires the defeat at the next opportunity of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. If it succeeds, we face a dangerous moment - although, thankfully, the mooted replacements are by no means as certain to agree with the rebel sentiment as they currently seek to imply.
A while back, when opponents of the war grew bored with saying it was all about oil, they would allege that it was Bush and Blair engaging in a little preliminary electioneering. This clearly ludicrous idea is probably the only element in the contradictory rhetorical arsenal of the anti-war effort that can ever be held up to objective scrutiny.
The remainder of their arguments are not refutable - not because they are correct, but because, unlike the decisions and actions of political leaders, they invite no responsibility for consequences.
Whatever about the possibilities for victory in Iraq, it was all but impossible for Mr Bush and Mr Blair to win the argument at home. If the war effort had rapidly succeeded, they would have been attacked as much for their precipitance as they are now on account of the protracted and bloody nature of the conflict.
Recent events demonstrate the point succinctly. The revelations about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison inevitably provided ammunition for those who continue to attack the decision to go into Iraq.
The torture of prisoners was indeed disgraceful, and the tactical/propaganda damage is perhaps its least worrying characteristic. Western civilisation is shamed by the fact that, in liberating a people from tyranny, it proceeded to treat some of them so appallingly.
But it is also interesting that the logic of the depraved and evil murderers of Nick Berg - that they acted in retaliation for Abu Ghraib - has widely been seen in the West as representing a further indictment of George W. Bush and Tony Blair.
It is not that opponents of the war actually welcomed the barbarous decapitation of an innocent civilian, but neither did they shrink from using it to further their arguments. Hence, the Western leaders are responsible not merely for the barbarity of their own side, but also for the inhumanity of our enemies.
Regardless of sequence or cause-and-effect, all negative developments, of whichever inclination, are interpreted as evidence of the folly or mendacity of the West's leaders.
By any sober reasoning, the murder of Nick Berg is evidence precisely of the correctness of the decision to go into Iraq. The presence there of a monster like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, regardless of whether he was friendly or hostile to Saddam, is in itself an illustration of the terrifying reality Bush and Blair sought to address. The possibility, now or ever, of Iraq or any such entity possessing weaponry of a potentially lethal kind, and of those falling into the hands of such individuals is one all of us in the West have the clearest interest in avoiding.
There can be no moral equivalence between the depraved actions of a few rogue soldiers and the savagery of Berg's murder. But the issues at stake here for Western societies extend far below the moral level. However much we repudiate the abuses of Abu Ghraib, we must know there is no possibility of the perpetrators or their anti-ethics offering a general threat to the world.
Private First Class Lyndie England is a disgrace to her uniform and the cause she claimed to serve, but she is not intent upon reshaping the global environment. And in contrast to what awaits her and her debased colleagues, we can be certain that not only will the butcher Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his followers not be called to answer by their own side, but that they have attracted the tacit approval of the most malign sentiment on the face of the earth.
Al Qaeda is not, as with a tiny minority of American troops, simply morally reprehensible: it seeks to impose its amorality by savagery on our world.
Those who attack the bona fides of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, and rejoice in their current discomfiture, are invited to ask themselves a simple question: in the future, should they have the misfortune to find themselves in a room with such as Mr Zarqawi, do they imagine that their Pollyanna pacifism, enlightened stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict, or contempt for Western leadership and authority will have the slightest influence on his ruminations about cutting off their heads?