Surprise! Surprise!

Gavin Esler practically jumped out of his seat on last night's Newsnight when he reported that the very composition of the Iraqi Government was effectively being determined in Tehran, as any normal person could have, and had, worked out anyway. Iran is the only winner of the Iraq War. It was even to Ahmadinejad's henchmen, the same people shooting at British troops in Basra, that Saddam Hussein was handed over by the Americans in order to be lynched.

The neocons have a long-running love affair with radical Islam, notably in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in Bosnia (now a "weak point" in the "War Against Terrorism" - surely not!) and Kosovo in the 1990s, and in Chechnya to this very day. They have removed Iran's enemies to the west and to the east, the former a key bulwark against the Wahhabism that the neocons are still actively shoring up in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; and under whom his country's people were significantly better off than they are today. In Syria, another bulwark, again against both Sunni and Shi'ite militancy, will be the next to go, followed by the fledgling Iranian democracy, in which case the neocons will, in different but related ways, have done both the Wahhabis' and the Shi'ite militants' jobs for them.

Meanwhile, the late George W Bush has, from beyond the grave, appointed an admiral rather than a general to run things in Iraq. It looks as if he's about to bring the troops home before his own top brass do it for him and tell him, effectively at gunpoint, where to stick any objections. They shouldn't give him the satisfaction: they, and their British opposite numbers, should order a full, immediate and unconditional withdrawal both from Afghanistan and from Iraq, and let Bush and Blair find out, once it had already happened, from the radio or the television like everybody else.