"C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute." It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. Barely a day has passed in recent weeks without some new Middle-Eastern event bringing to mind Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe's comments on hearing of Napoleon's execution of the Duc d'Enghien in 1804.

From the Israeli assassinations of Hamas leaders in Gaza to the Americans' murderous blunderings in Falluja and elsewhere, thoughtful politics and diplomacy have been blown away by the barrels of many guns. Only the Islamist-fascists can have reason to be pleased by the developments of the past month. If Bush and Sharon were on their side, they could hardly have planned things better.

How did things come to such a pass? How, in particular, did the US manage to squander so wantonly the sympathy and goodwill that came its way worldwide after the September 11th atrocities? Was it a crime or a mistake?

Unlike some on the Left, I don't doubt that the motives of most of those who supported the war on Iraq were honourable - particularly in this country, and particularly in the Labour Party. I share many of those motives myself. While others among my friends and political associates were marching in their millions in apparently unequivocal opposition to war, I was torn between that clear-cut standpoint and a deep-felt desire to see Saddam's tyranny destroyed. How else, if not by invasion and occupation, was that to be done? In common with most Iraqis, it would seem, I have still not managed convincingly to resolve that contradiction in my mind.

It's harder to attribute the same honourable motives to the US sponsors of war on Iraq. The smell of unfinished family business between the Bush clan and the Husseins, concealed in the ideological smog of neo-con fundamentalism, and fuelled by oil, arms and Israel, is a pungent one. But even without honour, there can be intelligence, whether military or otherwise. Both kinds have been conspicuous by their absence over Iraq.

I do not consider myself to be an Iraq 'expert'. I have worked on various stories and campaigns over the years about Saddam's use of chemical weapons, his suppression of the Kurds and others, the two Gulf Wars and the effect of UN sanctions on Iraq. As chairman of Medical Aid for Iraq, I was responsible with others in that organisation for getting the first convoy of medical supplies into the country after the 1991 war. Over the next decade, MAI took many other convoys into Iraq, working with and supplying hospitals throughout the country.

That experience alone has meant that nothing that has happened in Iraq since the invasion has come as any surprise. Not the collapse of Saddam's army and the relatively easy initial military victory of the coalition forces. Not the looting and breakdown of civil order that followed the removal of the dictatorship. And certainly not the - at best - ambivalent feelings of most Iraqis towards the occupation forces, towards which they felt simultaneously grateful for the overthrow of Saddam and resentful for their usurping of Iraqi sovereignty.

It was apparent - to me and my colleagues in MAI, at any rate - that the great majority of Iraqis felt equally hostile towards the 'international community' for the sanctions and continuing military action against their country as they did towards Saddam. It was clear that the aftermath of any overthrow of the Ba'athists would be messy, disordered and bloody. It was obvious that any foreign intervention would provoke large-scale resentment and, sooner or later, resistance, and that any such intervention would have be properly authorised, well prepared, tightly restrained and short-lived.

The fact that it has been none of these things illuminates a mindboggingly ignorant approach to international affairs. Did the US and its allies really believe that Iraq would behave like Paris in 1944 or Berlin in 1990? Was there no one around to tell them that Baghdad (and still less Falluja or Najaf) wouldn't be like that? Or didn't they ask anyone? Or listen to their replies?

The alarming thing is that, far from having learned any lessons from what has happened in Iraq over the past year, the US seems intent on repeating its mistakes. After a period of relative restraint (if sniper attacks and other shootings, helicopter gunship raids and the occasional bombing sally can be called restraint), the US administrator in Iraq, L Paul Bremer III, broke seven days of silence this week with a warning that the US military will not "hold back" indefinitely.

"They must be dealt with, and they will be dealt with," he said of the various insurgent forces, without putting a figure on how many more deaths must be added to the 1,000-plus Iraqis and 100-plus coalition soldiers who have already been killed during April.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government has declared that, not content with its 'targeted killings' in the occupied territories, it is now prepared to pursue Palestinian leaders in other countries too. One such target, according to the Israeli cabinet minister, Gideon Ezra, is the Damascus-based Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal. "The minute we have the operational opportunity we will do this," said Ezra.

Crimes and mistakes, what passes for western Middle East policy is littered with them.