Until today, Norman Lamont’s main claim to fame was as the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer who presided over Britain’s crashing out of the European Monetary System. From today, he will be known for something else.

In an article in the Telegraph, he calls for British troops to be withdrawn from Iraq. Virtually everything he says to back up this call for abject surrender is equally abject.

The Iraq war has been Britain’s biggest foreign policy humiliation since the 1930s.

Absurd. What about Suez, the defining event in the collapse of Britain’s national self-confidence? The Iraq war is still going on. Yes, there have been major mistakes, but it is not yet over. It is as absurd to say it is our ‘biggest humiliation’ás it would have been to have said something similar during the first four years of the British attempt to put down the insurgency in Malaya, during which time they made every mistake in the book before they went on eventually to be victorious a full eight years later.

For the Iraqi people, it has also been a disaster. Iraq has held elections, but no longer has an effective government. If there is one thing as bad as life under a tyrannical dictatorship, it is the anarchy of a failed state. They are merely different rooms in the same hell.

So the Iraqi Shia and Kurds (and doubtless many Sunni too) would like to be living again under Saddam Hussein, would they? I think not. Yes, the Iraqi government is not able to deliver order because it has been infiltrated by the militias. Yes, the carnage is appalling. Yes, it’s a mess. But the fact is that the terrorists’ aim, to destroy the Iraqi government, has not worked. The Shia leadership resolutely refuses to go down the path of civil war with the Sunni. They and the Kurds are still working together. That is a remarkable achievement which few thought would ever be possible.

The argument that the war was right, but that the post-war execution badly handled is just a sorry excuse from those with an unlimited capacity for self-delusion. Even if the number of American soldiers had been twice as large, the results would probably have been much the same.

Not a sorry excuse at all. Saddam posed a threat to the world. It was right to remove him. These arguments have been comprehensively rehearsed. What happened after that was a catalogue of incompetence, of which the failure to provide enough troops was key.

Once the initial welcome for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had passed, any prolonged occupation by alien troops was always going to be an increasing cause of resentment.

Doesn’t Lord Lamont realise that the vast majority of the violence in Iraq consists of Iraqis killing Iraqis? Yes, there’s some resentment of the coalition troops. Yes, those troops are being attacked, but they are not the principal targets nor the cause of the violence. If they were to pull out the carnage would not suddenly cease, as Lord Lamont appears to believe. It would become infinitely worse.

So far, so wrong. But then the argument moves into another circle of the Lamont intellectual hell altogether.

The real danger in the Middle East is that the situation in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iran could converge into an even bigger crisis. The problem is the inability of America to see anything from anyone else’s point of view, whether it be Palestine or Iran.

The point of view of Palestine? Would that perhaps be the point of view of the Hamas charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews? The point of view of Iran? Would that be the point of view of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who screams that he will exterminate Israel and then conquer the world? Can our problem really be that America doesn’t see the world through these eyes? How can anyone say such a thing?

But then Lord Lamont reveals just why he thinks America should see the world through the eyes of those committed to genocide. His points about the west historically having imposed its will on the Middle East to protect its own interests are fair enough in themselves. It has indeed done some extremely questionable things in the past. But then we get to the real point, the worm of real prejudice in this rotten apple:

Of course, Israel should be recognised. But, like it or not, the creation of the state of Israel is seen by many Arabs as an act of Western colonialism. Some, on the Right, such as the late Julian Amery, did support the creation of Israel as a noble colonial venture. While Tony Blair was absolutely right to condemn President Ahmadinejad’s outrageous comments about wiping Israel off the map, why was he so puzzled? He knows better than anyone that resentment over the partition of Ireland has lasted for more than 80 years. It is hardly surprising that bitterness over the appearance of a brand new state, with a population of six million people, is still there after 58 years. It is sad to say, but, after the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, to many Arabs Mr Ahmadinejad’s remarks now seem less outrageous, and his popularity has soared.

Well well, what have we got here crawling out of the woodwork? Someone who thinks Israel’s very existence is questionable. Just turn over in your mind that sentence ‘Of course, Israel should be recognised’. Stating that it should be recognised suggests inescapably that there is a legitimate question here of whether or not it should be recognised. 58 years after the Jewish nation state was restored, Lord Lamont still thinks there’s a valid question here? Can you imagine anyone saying ‘Of course Pakistan should be recognised’? Yes, the Arabs do see the creation of Israel as an act of western colonialsim. So what? The creation of the entire Middle East was an act of western colonialism. Does anyone suggest that Syria or Jordan should now not be recognised?

The weaselly phrasing of the rest of this paragraph merely worsens this very bad taste in the mouth. To be sure, it lays off the claim that Israel is a bad colonial mistake onto Arab perceptions, and purports merely to say that Arab bitterness to Israel is understandable, not that Lord Lamont necessarily shares such perceptions. Indeed, he carefully describes Ahmadinejad’s genocidal intention towards Israel as ‘outrageous’. Nevertheless, the implicit premise of this paragraph is that the Jews of Israel are the colonial occupiers of someone else’s country – and that people like Julian Amery, who supported the creation of Israel, were some kind of quixotic eccentrics. And the dig at Israel’s behaviour in the Lebanon war echoes the smear about its ‘disproportionate’ behaviour by those who say they support Israel’s ‘right to exist’ (big deal) but go for its jugular whenever it takes the steps that are regrettably necessary to prevent others from trying to terminate its existence.

In other words, Lord Lamont has bought into the Arab lie that Palestine belonged to the Arabs and the Jews are usurpers — the historically false claim that underpins Arab propaganda and which so many others now believe. The Jews, of course, were a nation state in Israel for a thousand years, millennia before Arabs came onto the scene at all; Palestine was under Arab, as opposed to Muslim, occupation for a mere couple of centuries; and between the time that the League of Nations decided in the early years of the last century to re-create a Jewish national home in Palestine and the creation of Israel in 1948, Palestine was not an Arab country; indeed, it was not a country at all.

In any event, what on earth, you might think, has Israel’s existence got to do with Iraq? In the real world, nothing whatever. But Lord Lamont is far from unique in making this connection. Despite the geopolitical and historical illiteracy of it, there is a widespread view in Britain – especially among establishment or military types of a certain age — that the real cause of Arab and Muslim rage at the west is the existence of Israel.

The failure of Messrs Bush and Blair and the neo-cons to understand Arab grievances has been translated into a ‘clash of civilisations’ and a threat to Western values ‘by people determined to destroy our way of life’, as the Prime Minister put it. But there is no clash of civilisations unless we are determined to create one. We are not going to live under a universal caliphate. Osama bin Laden and his gangsters have not the faintest chance of destroying our way of life, unless we do so ourselves.

What stunning ignorance and complacency. The jihadis make it abundantly plain in what they say that they are indeed waging a holy war upon western civilisation. We have not created a clash of civilisations; they have. We are on the receiving end of it. Only the very last part of this paragraph is true: it is the attitudes displayed by Lord Lamont which do indeed threaten to bring about our destruction.

This man was once the second most important person in the British government. He is currently a member of Britain’s upper house. He is an elder of the Conservative party. If you want to know what has gone wrong with the Conservative party and with Britain, here it is laid out in all the arrogance, ignorance and bigotry of the British ruling elite.