I was reminded of the story when reading Patrick Cockburn’s The Occupation, a vivid account of war and resistance in Iraq which is published by Verso this week. Cockburn describes a visit to Dhuluaya, a fruit-growing region 50 miles north of Baghdad, where, early on in the occupation, the American military cut down ancient date palms and orange and lemon trees as part of a collective punishment for farmers who had failed to inform them about guerrilla attacks. This vandalism will be remembered for generations, not because it outdoes the many horrors of the occupation, but because it was senseless and to the Iraqi mind powerfully symbolises the malice of the occupiers.

‘At times,’ Cockburn says of the period just after the invasion, ‘it seemed as if the American military was determined to provoke an uprising.’ Well, now it has got it, a ferocious war that in the last three months alone has cost 10,000 lives, most of them Iraqi. There seems no end to it and, as Cockburn writes in his conclusion, instead of asserting America’s position as a sole superpower, the occupation has amply demonstrated the limits of US power.

The precise opposite of the desired effect was also achieved in the idiotically named ‘War on Terror’. By the admission of intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic, Iraq has galvanised terrorism. Sections of a US National Intelligence estimate that was declassified by a reluctant President Bush last week say that the war has become the ‘cause celebre for jihadists’ and that ‘jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests’. In Britain, an independently leaked document, thought to have been compiled less than three months ago by a British MI6 (counter intelligence) officer attached to the Ministry of Defence, also pulls no punches. ‘The war on Iraq,’ it says, ‘has acted as a recruiting sergeant for extremists across the Muslim world... Iraq has served to radicalise an already disillusioned youth and Al Qaeda has given them the will, intent, purpose and ideology to act.’

Any number of commentators and a few politicians, for instance, Al Gore, Senator Robert Byrd in the US and Ken Clarke and the late Robin Cook in Britain, predicted precisely this outcome in the run-up to the war. The advice was there for Bush and Blair, but they never heeded it; indeed, both are still claiming measures of success for their Iraq policy. Only a tenth of the US document was published but it is enough to undermine the campaign by the administration over the last few weeks to portray Iraq as an essential part of the war on terror and making Americans safe at home. It’s a lie of monumental proportions which exceeds even Downing Street’s (the British Prime Minister’s office) manipulation of the September 2002 WMD dossier.

Iraq has done the opposite of making Americans safe and, with the midterm congressional elections coming in November, the Democrats now have an opportunity to make that case. Bill Clinton has urged his party to go on the offensive about the war and on Bush’s woeful negligence over the threat posed by Bin Laden. He went on Fox TV last Sunday and made the case himself about Bin Laden in a superbly pugnacious interview with Chris Wallace, pointing out that it was his successor, not he, who had downgraded the Al Qaeda threat and demoted the counter-terror expert who so feared Bin Laden. Confirmation of the Bush administration’s lassitude comes in Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial.

In July 2001, two months before the September attacks, Woodward reveals that the head of the CIA, George Tenet, and his counterterrorism chief, J Cofer Blaondeleezza Rice, then head of national security, to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence about an attack. Both men felt that she had not taken the warnings seriously.

Five years on, it is still important to fight for the accurate record of what happened. For instance, last week the former British Foreign secretary Jack Straw appeared on BBC television and volunteered that the situation in Iraq was ‘dire’, which indeed it is. He also stated that Tony Blair did not know until ‘late’ of America’s plans to attack Iraq.

That is not true. It has been established that on 22 September 2001, 11 days after the Al Qaeda attacks, Blair attended a dinner with Bush, Colin Powell and Christopher Meyer during which the attack on Iraq was raised not just as matter of idle speculation. Certainly from July the following year, Blair was signed up to the project. Is that late? No, Blair was on board from an early stage which is why we have the September 2002 dossier, yet Straw went unchallenged on this point.

Given the present state of Iraq, the diaspora of terror cells, the scandals of torture and extra judicial punishment in Guantanamo and Britain, it is remarkable that Blair is still Prime Minister, that no member of the war cabinet has apologised for this calamitous record and that the Labour party has not signalled its remorse in the slightest way.

Last week’s Labour party in the UK conference was devoted to a series of setpieces in which those responsible for the nation?s greatest foreign policy disaster since the Second World War were allowed to posture in front of a largely compliant audience.

Fortunately, I had the advantage of reading and not seeing Blair’s speech, which meant that I wasn’t exposed to his demonic charm and did not fall into the swoon that afflicted so many colleagues. I urge you to find the speech on the Labour party website and read exactly what he said and, while you’re about it, look up John Reid’s speech, too.

Both their statements on liberty, encapsulated by Blair’s view that ‘our idea of liberty is not keeping pace with change in reality’, are enough to give you an idea of the profound threat they represent to British democracy, to the traditions of open and accountable government, to the previous requirement that politicians accept responsibility for failed policies. Blair’s speech dealt with terrorism in the following sentences. ‘This terrorism isn’t our fault. We didn’t cause it. It’s not the consequence of foreign policy. It’s an attack on our way of life.’

He might have said that on 12 September 2001 and he would have been right, but five years later, it is his and Bush’s response to the threat — the invasion of Iraq — that has undeniably provided stimulus to the growth of terrorism and made the clash of civilisations a frightening possibility.

Nowhere in his speech did he acknowledge this. How could he without interfering with the delicate business of moulding his legacy? Apparently, he wasn’t heckled and no one in the hall fell off their chair laughing when he said he would dedicate the rest of his period in office to advancing peace between Israel and Palestinians. That agenda was his reason for wiring British foreign policy into the White House. But he has got nowhere with Israel during his first nine-and-a-half years, which leads one to suppose that he stands little chance during his remaining months in office. The only satisfaction to take out of this terrible episode is that the true account of what happened before the invasion of Iraq and why is being assembled, despite Bush and Blair’s best efforts to distort the record.

What we do now is an altogether different question and it will need a new generation of leaders to attempt to right the wrongs and set the West on a new course. But they will always have the memories of senseless destruction to contend with.

Henry Porter is an Observer columnist