With not a shot fired, the US-UK partnership is on the back foot, having fallen foul of a quirk within its own culture that ensures it almost certainly cannot win.
It is a strange paradox: Saddam, a psychopathic dictator, can make war as he pleases and become a mascot of the anti-war movement, while the leaders of the democratic world are cast as ugly warmongers.
Once, the West's military leaders had to consider consequences largely in terms of casualties and loss of territory, but here these are almost minor aspects.
Saddam can lose war after war and yet maintain his position; but the political survival of Bush and Blair depends on public opinion.
The true currency of war is not bombs and bullets, but the hearts and minds of an emoting public. And something has already shifted, as evidenced by the public sentiment against war. Messrs Bush and Blair could be forgiven for feeling confused, given that, a number of times since the Gulf War, US forces have conducted strikes against strategic targets in Iraq - and in doing so exceeded the mandate of UN resolutions - without any significant public outcry. Twelve years ago, not only was there no great expression of public outrage about Iraq being bombed back to the Stone Age, but people in Ireland and the UK were stocking up with beer and popcorn and rushing home to spend a night in front of the war.
Some new factor has intruded and it does not take a genius to work out what it is. Osama Bin Laden, if he was indeed the evil genius behind September 11th, has almost certainly read Don DeLillo's novel Mao II, in which the main character, novelist Bill Gray, is preoccupied with the idea that the role of his profession has been usurped by terrorists. "Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of a culture," he observed. "Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken the territory. They make raids on human consciousness."
September 11th was the ultimate such attack. Without television, it would have been meaningless. Its evil resided not simply in the ingeniousness of employing the crudest of technologies against the heart of modernity, but in its calculated strike against the Western imagination using the very instruments of mass communication that make Western civilisation, on its own terms, superior to others.
The symbolism of September 11th is, when you think about it, so shocking it becomes unthinkable that it could have been invoked deliberately. Did the perpetrators calculate, for example, that Americans would forever refer to the catastrophe as 911, the worldwide communications access number for emergency services? Did they consider that, seen in silhouette, the twin towers represented the number 11? It is as though the evil schemers had plumbed the unconscious of the West searching for symbols with which to unsettle it.
September 11th introduced a new element into "our" side of the equation: fear for ourselves. And by demonstrating that our deepest fears have a sound basis in reality, the architects of that obscenity marshalled Western public opinion to the cause of immobilising, and perhaps afterwards destroying, the West.
The presence of high levels of unspoken fear might help explain why so many fair-minded people have been willing to line up behind Trotskyist demagogues asserting a fatuous equivalence between the leaders of the Free World and Saddam Hussain, a thoroughly sadistic despot, who has employed the most vile methods of fear-generation against anyone who stands in his way. It is not just that he is known to possess a massive arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, but that he has shown a willingness to use these without mercy. The issue, therefore, is not the morality of military action but the relative effectiveness of this compared to playing a longer game.
The anti-war movement has draped itself in a moralistic piety predicated on the fate of Iraqi children, but this is no more instructive than the charges of anti-Americanism. Really what is being expressed is a quite rational fear for the security of the previously unassailable West. The objections to the use of Shannon by American forces is not a moral one, but a sublimated dread of the consequences if Ireland were to volunteer itself as a target for reprisals. In the new peacenikism we find fear expressed as conscience, and Bush and Blair are skewered by the fact that every morality play needs villains and victims.
In rendering it almost impossible for a war to be fought without the leaders of the West offering themselves for political sacrifice, our civilisation places itself at greater future risk.
Public fear has infected the West with the same paralysis as immobilises those around Saddam who would have taken him out long ago had they not been terrified of what would follow failure. But if the West insists on being ruled by fear, the consequences may involve September 11th acquiring through history the status of prophecy rather than apocalypse.