In the beginning, says a much-repeated joke, was The Plan. Deemed excellent, at first, it passed through many reinterpretations at successive levels of bureaucracy, and ended up being derided as a crock of shit. Britain’s plan for reconstructing Iraq in 2003 might have met the same fate, only there wasn’t one. Don’t laugh: Australia had no plan either, excellent or crock.

The United States did have a plan, but it had been drawn up by the State Department before the invasion of Iraq, and the Pentagon ignored it. After the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under Paul ‘Jerry’ Bremer took over the reconstruction of Iraq, it drew up another plan, but he ignored that too. Perhaps Bremer was guided by the aphorism of H.L. Mencken that the well-known solution to every human problem is neat, plausible and wrong.