The tide really is turning in England.

HARK — CAN YOU hear it? Borne on the wind, can you hear the sounds of construction — of hammers hammering and woodsaws sawing? And do you detect a note of panic? I do. The good ship Neocon is going down. She has struck the Iraqi rocks, the engine room is awash, and on the deck in anxious pursuit of something to float them away is a curious assembly.

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Our British neocons have invested heavily in this ill-fated craft, and the wreck is total. How shall they be saved? Never fear. They’ve been working on the elements of a rescue plan. By Christmas all will be singing from the same sheet. All together, now, warrior-columnists and soon-to-be-former Cabinet ministers: one, two three . . .

“The principle was good but the Americans screwed up the execution.”

Oh diddums, guys. Damned awful luck. You had this fantastic plan for invading a foreign country and harnessing a grateful populace behind your ideas for rebuilding an Arab nation along better lines — and then along come the Americans and make a mess of it. Now why in Heaven’s name would they do a thing that? Vandals

Anyway, the idea that you can simply decapitate a regime like his is dubious — as if there had been a Whitehall-style mandarinate there, with a cadre of Sir Humphreys in a Baghdad club, awaiting a memo that a new government had taken over. But the coiled spring driving the clockwork of both the civil and the military parts of Baathist administration was terror and brutality from top to bottom. At the apex was one monstrous dictator. Remove him and all would have fallen into chaos and corruption. An occupying power that tried to slip its bottom smoothly into the driver’s seat while leaving the vehicle (the existing police, army and Civil Service) intact would have found the machine impossible to drive. And today everyone would be grandly pronouncing that of course our mistake was not to have removed at once Saddam’s bloodstained, corrupt and hated state machine.

The former hawks of press and politics now scramble for the status of visionaries let down by functionaries. This is a lifeboat that will not float. Let these visionaries understand that occupation is always brutal and usually resisted; that occupying armies are always tactless, sometimes abusive and usually boneheaded; that in the argument between hands-on and hands-off you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t; and that the first, original and central cause of the Iraq fiasco was not the bad manners of this or that poor, half-educated squaddie from Missouri, nor the finer points of this or that State Department doctrine of neocolonial administration.

The reason for failure was not the post-invasion strategy. It was the strategy of invasion. Blame the vision, not the execution.