Franks: “We did anticipate a level of violence, and I can’t tell you whether we anticipated that it would be… at the level that we see right now.… We can always hope for a transition without a great deal of messiness.”

Rumsfeld: “The plans are not for the U.S. or the coalition to reconstruct Iraq.… It’s the Iraqi people who have to reconstruct their country.… It’s heady and arrogant to say you can build another people’s nation.”

This was a new policy, a bald reversal of U.S. doctrine. It was the opposite of the Marshall Plan for Europe: it was the Roman plan for Gaul, the Yankee plan for the Confederacy. The military conquers or liberates, depending on your point of view, and then withdraws, leaving a vacuum, into which rushes can-do business with its sleeves rolled up and a cost-plus contract in its briefcase.

Rumsfeld went even further, with a reference to contract troops—mercenaries, soldiers rented from American companies, like the ones hired to guard the postwar president of Afghanistan. Why should American business wait until the shooting stops? Vice President Richard Cheney’s former employer Halliburton had already moved private contractors into the field alongside the U.S. armed forces to provide logistical services, at a cost of 1.34 billion dollars and rising. Here’s the twenty-first-century nation-building model: American armed forces (private and public sector) destroy, American private sector corporations rebuild. Another substantial redistribution of U.S. tax money to the business world.

So there’s lots of money to be had in the Iraq campaign. The cost was…?

Byrd, West Virginia: “I’ve heard the figure one point five billion a month.”

Rumsfeld: “Three point nine billion dollars a month.” Roughly twice the previous public estimate. The reporters started scribbling, and on the far end of the big horseshoe table, Clinton of New York made a little note. A torpid economy, a huge deficit; Bush’s father had learned that military success and the high approval ratings it brought were no protection in hard times.

The air on Constitution Avenue was still sweltering; in Baghdad the forecast for the next day was clear, sunny, 45 degrees Celsius, 113 degrees Fahrenheit, body armour mandatory for all troops on duty.

In London at that point in the summer there was a noisy battle underway at Westminster, with the government under attack for prevarication and cruelty. But Washington was at the end of its political year. Congress was about to rise, the politicians to head back to their states and districts to consider their wins and losses and to make plans for the fall.

Still, the question remained unanswered: Why had there been such an urgent need to attack Saddam Hussein when most of the world thought an attack was premature? What was the threat that made the delay of a month or two out of the question? How good was the evidence that Saddam possessed prohibited weapons and was ready to use them or give them to terrorists? The deputy secretary of defense might have been able to explain much of this. But it seemed his appointment book was full.