It was in this speech — with Bush’s move to the White House still more than a year into the future — that Blair made a case against Saddam: “Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men — Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic.” And — before confirmation came on September 11, 2001 — he reminded America that as the world’s most powerful country it could not afford to retreat into isolationism.

Now each passing day brings more bad news from Iraq. But Blair’s role in the conduct of the war — in failing to provide a steadying hand and in presenting the case for invasion — came under a cloud very soon after the “coalition of the willing” swept into Mesopotamia. The claims on weapons on mass destruction at Saddam’s disposal to be used within an hour’s notice, defence scientist David Kelly’s death, the Hutton inquiry are, in this story, long familiar milestones.

Also tossed into a mangled heap were arguments for empire that today seem so quaint that it takes effort to remember how seductively they raged just four years ago, and how they swept Blair’s ‘liberal interventionism’ into contestations of America’s imperial burden. Interestingly, the most lively arguments came from intellectuals belonging to Commonwealth countries.

On the liberal end of the spectrum, Canadian human rights scholar Michael Ignatieff wrote in a seminal essay (‘Empire Lite’) in January 2003: “What word but ‘empire’ describes the awesome thing that America is becoming?” This empire was obtained in a state of deep denial but 9/11 showed it contours and the “avenging hatred it arouses”. But: “America’s empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man’s burden. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known.”

... contd.