Jonathan Raban argues that, apart from the immediate cost in human life, military intervention in Iraq has also represented a disastrous failure of imagination and a fatal inability to understand the role of history - and religion - in the region
Victory in just three weeks, relatively few western casualties and now, at last, even dancing on the streets. So, asks Julian Barnes, did those of us who opposed the Iraq conflict get it wrong?
How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilisation.
In the 1950s Arab nationalism looked set to spawn a secular superstate in the Middle East. Adeed Dawisha charts its roller-coaster journey in Arab Nationalism in the 20th Century
The day will get off to a cloudy start. It will be quite chilly But as the day progresses The sun will come out And the afternoon will be dry and warm. In the evening the moon will shine And be quite bright. There will be, it has to be said, A brisk wind But it will die out by midnight. Nothing further will happen. This is the last forecast.
Anthony Swofford came from a military family. He was a US marine to the bone. But when he was sent to fight in the 1991 Gulf war and saw the devastation he was part of, doubts and despair set in. What were they fighting for? He tells how it felt to be a soldier on the ground, under fire from the enemy, and, worse, from his own side.
Robert Kagan coined the phrase "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus". Here he argues that Tony Blair is the only leader who can bring the two back together.