Bush still sees no reason to apologise

If anyone was looking for even the slightest hint of second thoughts from those led the US into Iraq, they would have been sorely disappointed on the third anniversary of a war that is eating into America's soul and that may well reshape its political landscape.

More sacrifice would be required, but "our goal is nothing less than complete victory", President George Bush declared in his weekly radio address yesterday.

Ignore the doom-mongering, Dick Cheney urged his countrymen on CBS's Face the Nation programme. This was no civil war; rather the insurgents had reached "a stage of desperation". On both the security and political fronts, Iraq was showing "major progress".

Writing in The Washington Post, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary - blamed by many for the absence of post-invasion planning - was equally unrepentant. The big picture would be determined by history, "not by daily headlines, website blogs, or the latest sensational attack", Mr Rumsfeld declared. To retreat now would be "the modern equivalent of handing post-war Germany back to the Nazis, or of asking the former Communist states of eastern Europe to return to Soviet domination because the West did not have the patience to see through the job of turning them into free countries".

The plain fact, however, is that back in March 2003, almost no Bush administration policy-maker could even imagine that yesterday the country would be in agonising debate over a conflict three years old with no end in sight - in an Iraq that even the pro-American former prime minister Iyad Allawi said was in the midst of a civil war.

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