THIS is a 'clarification' from No. 10 Downing Street. When the deputy prime minister says 'illegal', he means 'legal'. When he says 'disastrous', he means 'brilliant'. When he says 'black', he is fumbling for the word 'white'.

On Wednesday, Nick Clegg stood at the dispatch box in the British House of Commons and described the Iraq war as “the most disastrous decision of all” and the invasion of Iraq as “illegal”. Downing Street hurriedly explained that what he actually meant was that the invasion was a triumph of British arms and as lawful as driven snow.

Earlier in the week, the head of MI5, the British security service, at the time of the war, Lady Manningham-Buller, had vindicated Clegg's statement. So, too, had earlier evidence from Lord Goldsmith, the then attorney general. To Downing Street, this was of no matter. Clegg was caught between the whirring flywheel of truth and the crashing gears of a mendacious diplomacy. He was torn to shreds.

The Liberal Democrat leader appears to have come unqualified for the task of high office. When pushed against the wall by the arch-warmonger, Labour's Jack Straw, he showed himself a serial truth-teller. While this handicap may not be insuperable at home, in foreign affairs it is a killer. Clegg was supposed to lie under political torture, and failed.

The prime minister, David Cameron, who is intelligent enough to agree with Clegg, was in a difficult position. He was visiting Barack Obama in Washington at the time. He knows, with the US president, that Afghanistan is the next most disastrous decision after Iraq. The two men can say that in private, but not in public. There they have to present Afghanistan as a great victory for Nato, a triumph of liberal interventionism. Britain and the US are marching to war shoulder to shoulder against Johnny Taliban. Defeat is not an option.

Cameron and Obama have emerged from this first bilateral meeting as sensible men who must somehow navigate their respective ways from an inherited war to an honourable peace, amid a western foreign policy that has spent a decade drenched in sophistry. Commentators are often asked to predict history's verdict on a particular era, and are well advised to decline. But it is hard not to see western policy in the first decade of the 21st century as sunk in a morass of folly. It was subcontracted to a defence lobby desperate for a role, which it found in exploiting weak leaders by playing on the ideology of fear.

As a result, at the end of the decade western states found themselves spending more money to become less safe, with their global interests more at risk than at the start. The legacy of the victory over communism was squandered.

— The Guardian, London