Today’s Telegraph reports John Bolton, America’s former ambassador to the UN, saying two significant things. The first is that the west needs to attack Iran before it gets the nuclear bomb, a technical achievement which now looks unstoppable — and that the EU, which still appears to believe that diplomacy will work, has got to wake up and smell the coffee. He is correct. The choice is not between a negotiated peace with Iran and a war with appalling risks. It is a choice between a war with appalling risks and an Iran that will hold the world to nuclear ransom, having destroyed Israel as a throat-clearing exercise. It is a choice between war with Iran, and war with a nuclear Iran; war on our terms, and war on Iran’s terms; war in which we take the initiative and thus have every prospect of winning, and war in which Iran holds the trump card, which means we have a near certainty of losing.

At the same time, as Bolton also emphasised, making such a grim choice must be a last resort. All-out war with Iran is a prospect fraught with appalling perils and uncertainties. Only a fool would embark upon such a war precipitately. But only a fool would rule it out as a possibly inevitable last resort. The problem is that the EU — and parts of the US government — are behaving as if such a last resort is totally unthinkable. This has powerfully undermined the diplomacy, since Iran clearly believes — and with good reason — that the west simply isn’t serious about enforcing its will and will never go to war against Iran in any circumstances. This impression, which has hugely strengthened the Iranian regime both at home and abroad, has been disastrously reinforced by the weakness of President Bush and the consequent rise to dominance of the appeasement tendency in his administration — which is why the admirable John Bolton can now do little more than make speeches from the sidelines.

However, the conspiracy of fools which refuses to accept the necessity of war as a last resort is not the only problem here, bad enough as it is. The startling thing is that not everything is being done that could be done to avoid making that choice of last resort. Much could be done short of all-out war to ratchet up the pressure on Iran. Yet virtually nothing is being done that might put Iran, rather than ourselves, on the back foot.

In particular, it is simply astounding that the west is not acting to defend itself against attacks being orchestrated by Iran — not forgetting its sidekick Syria, which is facilitating the passage of fighters into Iraq. Iran is heavily engaged in arming, training and supplying the Iraqi insurgency. Western soldiers are being blown up by Iranian roadside bombs. Iran is now working with every type of group in Iraq, Sunni as well as Shia, in its effort to defeat the coalition, stymie Iraqi democracy and seize control of Iraq for itself.

Yet neither America nor Britain is fighting back against this. They will not cross the border into Iran or Syria in hot pursuit. The recent humiliation of Britain’s navy, when the 15 sailors were taken hostage, occurred because the British rules of engagement forbade firing on Iranian forces in self defence. Even more astounding, there are no covert operations being conducted within Iran or Syria —no strategic targets being blown up, no terror godfathers being killed, nothing going on at all, despite the fact that such operations would put the kind of pressure on Iran and Syria that weakened them both militarily and psychologically. Every military analyst worth his salt knows this. Wise heads in the military have been tearing out their hair for a long time about the President’s refusal to take this kind of action which might avert the appalling perils of all-out war with Iran. So why does America seem to be paralysed?

The reason is the weakness of President Bush — and it’s not just his political weakness. To be effective, a chief executive — which is what the President is —has to show leadership by choosing between the options he is offered by members of his board who have diametrically opposing views. If he refuses to make such choices but requires his board instead to come up with a consensus which he can then approve, he is sunk and his enterprise will go down with him, sucked into the soggy quicksands of the lowest common denominator. That, alas, is how Bush conducts his Presidency. More than any other single factor, it is the reason for the many disasters in Iraq. The President does not require arguments to be laid out in front of him so that he can make a choice. He requires a consensus to be presented to him. But from the very start, his administration has been at war within itself, with Defence, State and the CIA at each other’s throats and even warring within themselves. The result has been that the policies going to the President for his approval bear the ‘consensual’ stamp of the most powerful beasts in the Beltway jungle who have managed to eviscerate their rivals. And those beasts happen to belong at present to the pack of ravening appeasers.

In the light of this, John Bolton’s second significant contribution was his revelation that Foreign Office officials worked to undermine Tony Blair’s pro-American policies at the United Nations because they had been ‘infected’ by French and German views:

Mr Bolton, who has been criticised privately by British diplomats as an abrasive unilateralist who showed contempt for the UN, singled out Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and his successor Sir Emyr Jones Parry, who is still in the post. ‘Greenstock was a lot of the problem,’ he said.

British diplomats, Mr Bolton said, were vehemently opposed to much of what Mr Blair wanted to do. ‘On Iraq in particular, they didn’t like it. It reflected the increasingly Eurocentric view of the Foreign Office, where they’re just not as Atlanticist as they used to be. This is probably the biggest split between the Foreign Office and the British people as a whole, who remain basically at least somewhat Eurosceptic.’

Given the virulent opposition of large sections of the British establishment and intelligentsia towards America and the war in Iraq — much of which is the product of rather deeper and even more obnoxious attitudes than rampant EUphilia, which is itself as much the result of those attitudes as their cause — such reported disloyalty within King Charles Street is not surprising. But it reveals Blair’s unwavering support for Bush and the war to be an even more lonely and admirable position than has been acknowledged.

Nevertheless, that’s all over now. Blair is bidding Britain the longest farewell in human history; his as-yet uncrowned successor Gordon Brown has signalled that if America wants to have another war it can go and take a running jump; and in America itself, the unsavoury combination of Democratic opportunism and Republican panic that the war in Iraq may be being lost are helping ensure that it will indeed be lost. The word from the military on the ground in Iraq is that, in a highly complex and very difficult situation, significant progress is now being made on both the security and political fronts. A strategy is in place under General Petraeus which has a reasonable chance of working. There are promising signs, particularly the fact that the Sunni insurgents have themselves turned against al Qaeda, which has lost its base amongst the Sunni who are appalled by the slaughter that al Qaeda is perpetrating upon their people.

So there is a real window of opportunity here. But huge problems remain, not the least of which is the need to flush out the sectarian infiltration of the Iraqi government itself. This will all take time; but the military strategy on the ground is now running up smack against the timetable for America’s retreat from Iraq which has been imposed by panicky and spineless politicians (not to mention Britain’s even more shameful retreat from Basra). The short-termism and sheer stupidity in all this is truly mind-blowing. History has repeatedly shown that, in far less fraught theatres of war and insurgency, it takes many years to bring order and security. How much more so is this in Iraq, where the scale of the slaughter in the cause of preventing a free, stable and prosperous Iraq is in direct proportion to the setback for the global jihad against the free world were it to be so. Yet America and Britain want out as soon as possible — regardless of the lessons of history, regardless of how this will strengthen the enemy, regardless of common-sense, reality and an elementary regard to cultural self-preservation. The bad guys are now in control — and that’s just in the west.

It’s the leadership, stupid.