Opinion: Two years ago, the liberation of Iraq began, and this weekend the "anti-war" movement marked the occasion with some mass demonstrations.
As mass demonstrations go they were a little underpowered: 10,000 showed up in London's Hyde Park, which seems a little thin next to last week's scenes of a million citizens on the streets of Damascus - or close to a third of the entire population of Lebanon.
Heigh-ho. If Europe's "anti-war" movement is determined to align itself against the people of the Middle East and on the side of their dictators, that's up to it. But not everything is a matter of opinion and, two years on, it's worth revisiting some of the assertions made by the usual experts.
Not about the war itself - the idiotic predictions of how Baghdad would be the new Stalingrad: reduced to rubble, with coalition troops fighting in bloody hand-to-hand combat street-to-street for months on end.
But the assertions made after the regime fell, when the experts, without pausing for even a moment of sheepish embarrassment, instead immediately moved on to even more idiotic predictions.
Here are the Top Ten Quagmires of the Week from two years ago. I cheerfully mocked them at the time, but it seems appropriate to revisit them as a glimpse into the mindset of the eternal naysayers:
1 "Iraq's Slide Into Violent Anarchy" (The Guardian, April 11th 2003).
Even at the height of the now flailing insurgency, this was never true. For most of the last 23 months, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of Iraq has been peaceful and well-governed. In the north, there's been a tourism boom and most hotels are enjoying capacity bookings. The violence around Falluja was never an accurate reflection of the country as a whole - if Kurdistan is Scotland and Basra is Surrey, the Sunni Triangle was the Northern Ireland of Iraq: at the very least, an unreliable measure of the overall temperature.
2 "The head of the World Food Programme has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster" (The Australian, April 11th 2003).
Two years on: no humanitarian disaster. Indeed, no "humanitarians". The NGOs fled Iraq after the bombing of the UN mission in August 2003 and nobody noticed, confirming what some of us have long suspected: the permanent floating crap game of the humanitarian lobby has a vastly inflated sense of its own importance.
3 "Iraqis Now Waiting for Americans to Leave" (Associated Press, April 10th 2003).
As I wrote at the time, "There will be terrible acts of suicide-bomber depravity in the months ahead, but no widespread resentment at or resistance of the Western military presence." Today, the suicide-bomber depravity is getting more depraved even as it gets more impotent: on January 30th - election day - the brave "insurgents" were reduced to conscripting a kid with Down's Syndrome and sending him off packed with explosives. But there remains no widespread popular "resistance" except in the minds of the left's armchair insurgents: after all, if there were mass demonstrations against the Americans, do you think RTÉ and the BBC would be shy about showing them to us?
4 "If Saddam is not found dead, or caught alive, it will be the worst of all possible closures for the war against Iraq" (Roland Flamini, UPI, April 10th 2003).
Two years on: Saddam is in jail. His sons are dead. All but a handful of the Pentagon's deck of cards showing Iraq's most wanted now fall into one or other of those categories.
5 "Iraq was a new country cobbled together from several former Ottoman provinces, its lines drawn by the Europeans" (Mark Mazower, the Independent, April 7th, 2003).
It's a phony-baloney state, you can never make a go of it.
With hindsight, the "cobbled together" part turned out to be a big plus; the design flaw of Iraq is paradoxically its greatest strength. The Shia are the biggest group, but, even if they were utterly homogeneous, which they're not, they're not so big that they can impose their will easily on the Kurds and Sunni. The elected government of free Iraq will be a coalition of Shia, Sunni, Kurdish, secular and religious interests. The sight of eight million Iraqis going to the polls was profoundly moving to their neighbours in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt etc. But it was all the pluralist multi-party smoke-filled room horse-trading - in a word, politics - that caught the fancy of the frustrated political class in neighbouring countries.
6"Turkey is concerned that a Kurdish capture of Kirkuk could help bankroll moves to establish an independent Kurdistan" (Agence France-Presse, April 9th, 2003).
As I wrote at the time, "Nothing to worry about. They'll settle for being Scotland or Quebec rather than Pakistan" - or, come to that, the Irish Free State. And so it's turned out.
7 "Rather than reforming the Muslim world, the conquest of Iraq will inflame it" (Jeffrey Simpson, Toronto Globe and Mail, April 10th, 2003).
If anything ought to have been killed off this last month, it should be the lazy reductive concept of "the Arab street". Ever since 9/11, doom-mongers have been trying to stir this supposedly seething thoroughfare. In October 2001 Faizal Aqtub Siddiqi, president-general of the International Muslims Organisation, said the bombing of Afghanistan would create 1,000 bin Ladens. In April 2003, Egypt's president Mubarak said the bombing of Iraq would create 100 bin Ladens. So right there you've got a 90 per cent reduction in the bin Laden creation programme - just by bombing a second Muslim country. Two years later, even Mubarak's given up on the bin Laden creation numbers and the Arab street finally roused itself - in Beirut, against Bashar Assad.
8 "Looting is always unsavoury. Let's hope the Americans don't pilfer the oil" (Brenda Linane, the Age of Melbourne, April 11th, 2003).
As we now know, the only folks pilfering the oil were those well-connected officials and cronies living high off the hog from the UN's disgusting Oil For Food programme, a sewer of corruption that ought to force the resignation of Kofi Annan.
9 "Weapons of Mass Destruction. Remember them? Not a single one has yet been found" (Bill Neely, ITV, April 10th, 2003).
They were found. In Libya. Close enough for me. And, thanks to the suddenly co-operative Col Gadafy, we now know a lot more about A Q Khan's role to disperse Pakistani nuclear technology throughout the Muslim world.
10 "America is already losing the peace!" (Everyone.)
Plenty of mistakes were made, but none was serious enough to alter the real dynamic of events. The creative destabilisation of the region set in motion by the fall of Saddam proceeds apace. America is winning the peace, and so are the people of the Middle East.