When will the left get over it? Saddam was a brutal tyrant who had to go

Whatever - Rummy will not be reaching for the quick eze just yet and Wolfie will not be burdened by self doubts on the strength of Le Carre’s latest scribblings. Rather they will have already appreciated that what passes for much of the political left these days has sheared its mooring from enlightenment values and is increasingly willing itself into political irrelevance. In this vein, Bush’s next cake walk will see the once-great Democratic party as no more than a bump in the road back to the White House.

Oh, and by the way, there is emerging evidence that Iraqi intelligence was up to its sweaty armpits in intrigue with Al Qua'ida – so all those US yokels patronisingly disparaged by Le Carre may well have been justified after all, to make the link between Saddam and September 11. Had Le Carre (or his retailer Summers) bothered to inquire, links between the Iraqi secret police and the OBL and his buddies, were credibly reported in The Guardian well before September 11.

Like so many commentators on this issue, Summers demonstrates a complete inability or unwillingness to deal with the world as it exists in the face of clear threats to the security of the secular democratic west, and not as imagined in some post-60s fantasy.

For reasons quite apart from those offered by Summers, we may indeed agree with her that the world has become an even scarier place than we could possibly have imagined.