I went to Washington and London to watch the wars.

A military campaign has civilian campaigns preceding it, pacing it, and trailing behind it: pre-wars, parallel wars, fought for political advantage, supremacy in military strategy and procurement, image, bureaucratic advancement, reputation, profit. This was my front: the briefcase skirmishes.

On a steamy July day, in a large cool room in the Hart Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee met to consider the outcome of the war in Iraq.

Rank in the room was striated, geological. Senior senators sat in shiny black chairs on a high dais; junior senators, staff members, and witnesses in shiny black chairs set lower; reporters and private citizens at floor level, in steel chairs covered in dull brown cloth.

The focus of all this was Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. defence secretary, a small square-faced scrappy man with the air of James Cagney—chin thrust out, thin smile: a former U.S. congressman, a Navy pilot, a veteran of mammoth wars in the upper levels of government and business, the main proponent and strategist of the Second Gulf War. His objective at the hearing was to meet the first tentative criticisms from the Democrats and neutralize them.

Rumsfeld was dressed in a banker’s suit. To his left was his uniformed senior commandant, General Tommy Franks. Each brought prepared statements. Franks’s was full of military language, such as “footprint” for number of soldiers in the field, “gwot” for Global War On Terrorism. Rumsfeld’s was simple, aggressive, large in its claims: the war is over, and we won.

The Republican senators piled on the compliments. “What you folks have done,” said Inhofe of Oklahoma, “is end this monstrous, bloody regime.” Warner of Virginia: “We salute all the men and women of the coalition forces and their families.” These were the bugles. Then, from the Democrats, the first ranging shots, the first salvoes in the spin war.

The timing seemed right. Rumsfeld’s military campaign had reached its high-water mark on May 1, when President Bush declared the heavy fighting over. In the weeks that followed mysterious gunmen began to pick off American soldiers singly and in groups, in ambushes, in drive-by shootings, sometimes in sudden suicidal confrontations.

Kennedy of Massachusetts: “I’m now concerned that we have the world’s best-trained soldiers serving as policemen in what seems to be a shooting gallery.”

Rumsfeld: “I think we have to get some perspective on this and put this in context and think back in history. This is tough stuff. This is hard work. This takes time.”