There is one grim, twisty rule about the politics of death in action. It isn’t the bodybags coming home that make the difference, sap the resolve and drain the popularity. It is the suitcases packed and stacked on the front porch for those who may replace the fallen. The real pressure points are in the waiting and the anticipation.

 

That’s why, whatever else is said this week after Basra and more British deaths, no political player – not even an MoD emailer – will start talking about troops out of Iraq. Long years of a regular army doing its duty in Northern Ireland have anaesthetised us to the drip-drip- drip of casualties.

 

We give our boys in their flag-covered coffins a suitably ceremonial farewell, but we do not question their sacrifice. They did their duty, didn’t they? Why sully their memory by asking whether that tour of duty was strictly necessary? David Kelly rates a full inquiry, but three dead military policemen on a dusty road barely rate a second’s reflection. Just sound the Last Post and move on.

 

Another death out in Iraq and then another don’t counsel withdrawal. On the contrary, it seems, they merely mean more of the same: more soldiers, more flak jackets, more jut-jawed resolution.

 

Pause, though, and watch how the rhythms inside our so- called coalition of the willing begin to beat out dissonant tunes. Tony Blair, it is confidently asserted, has more trouble over weapons of mass destruction than George Bush because American public opinion, happy with a job swiftly done, isn’t too fussed about bodged-up intelligence assessments. It’s over, let it go. Score one for a president supposedly cruising towards re- election. Mire one for a prime minister where detail counts.

 

But Bush, too, has his own special handicaps. Blair can be up to his rictoid grin in Hutton sludge and still enjoy a clear five-point lead over the Tories. George is down (from 82% approval two years ago) to a 52-48 edge over an unnamed generic Democrat (and is now actually losing 48-45 on the Zogby poll’s regular question of whether he or “a newcomer” should be next into the White House).

 

Why this accelerating sinking feeling? The US economy, after all, is showing signs of life. It’s high summer. People ought to be feeling good. And we know foreign affairs don’t shift votes, don’t we?

 

No: we don’t. Take another fascinating poll. A Scripps Howard/Ohio University sampling of the mood in the south. Here’s the region that, quite disproportionately, recruits its sons and daughters to go to war. A region of tradition and conservatism and military pride. A region that salutes when the commander-in-chief comes into the room. A region that backed Operation Iraqi Freedom to the hilt.

 

And now? Now 42% of southerners question whether the war was worth it. Now Bush approval is down from 69% to 57% in a couple of months. Now 72% of the south’s black population – America‘s foot soldiers in the search for Saddam – have turned against the involvement, a switch of nearly 20% since May.

 

These aren’t small or insignificant movements. On the contrary, they’re big and they fit together. As Nikos Zahariadis, professor of political science at the University of Alabama, says: “It seems paradoxical, but many people from the south weren’t supporting Bush, they were supporting the troops… and now they’re wondering exactly when their husbands and sons and daughters are coming home.”

 

That’s the thing about strong regional identities and communities. Those troops still in Baghdad, still taking casualties, thought they’d be home long ago. But they’re stuck. And those other units in waiting across the south see the call coming for them, too. The entanglement is specific and dangerous and apparently interminable. Did Bush or Rumsfeld spell that out last March? Of course not. Even this month, Bush was still setting himself short, sweet deadlines. “We’ve got a year and a while during my first term to make the world a more peaceful place, and we’ll do it.”

 

But the world is not, remotely, a more peaceful place. The Middle East road map lies in a pile of rubble – just like the UN headquarters in Baghdad. OK, so the “war against terror” was always going to be long. How long is long? How much more of this empty reassurance is any electorate supposed to take without choking? These have been an awful seven days for empty reassurances.

 

Is it too late to change course? Perhaps not. “Defeating al-Qaida would not end the problem of proliferation,” writes Madeleine Albright in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “because al-Qaida is deadly even without nuclear, chemical and biological arms. But, meanwhile, the nuclear programmes of North Korea and Iran are driven by nationalism, not terrorism, and must be dealt with primarily on that basis. September 11, the administration’s eureka moment, caused it to lump together terrorists and rogue regimes and to come up with a prescription for fighting them – namely, pre- emption – that frightens and divides the world at precisely the moment US security depends on bringing people together.”

 

So wiser counsels may finally prevail. So the flaunting of US power, the facile bullying of Iran and Syria, the belief that the Pentagon can run the world may be over. But is it already too late?

 

Why should we assume, for instance, that a UN-led force in Iraq will not be sabotaged and attacked? That wasn’t last week’s obvious lesson. Why should we assume that a broader Nato coalition – as in Kosovo – will fit the bill? Al-Qaida lives in Riyadh, not Pristina. Getting in was easy. Getting out is already a nightmare, the nightmare for George Bush. And Tony Blair’s deepest worry after Hutton, curiously, may be what happens to the faithful dog when he no longer hears his master’s voice, singing the Song of the South.

---