Bill Clinton christened himself “the comeback kid”, but it is his former vice-president, Al Gore, who is earning the tag For he has recently gone from zero to hero. I was genuinely surprised by the news that nine million adult males in the UK out of a possible 22 million have accessed porn sites on the internet

Can the number really be so small?. Even the Iraqi Ministry of Defence appears to be uncertain who their army and police are working for.. The Iraqi Army and police may be as much part of the problem as part of the solution. That strategy has assumed that the United States and Britain can gradually hand over responsibility to the new Iraqi Army and police, then get our boys home That assumption is no longer valid. Recently, a message in Arabic was scrolled across the screen on Iraqi TV.

It said: “The Ministry of Defence requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

This request goes to the heart of the void in American and British strategy. If you make the minutest adjustments to the edge of a composition, you can tighten it and make it look better It’s like cutting an inch off your hair It’s a bit tidier. If you have 95 per cent perfection and there’s some kind of imbalance that can be remedied by chopping off a few inches, then why not? I cannot imagine anything sillier than being beholden to the size of a canvas.. What happened, in some cases, was that Constable’s things were painted right to the edge. Constable took pains to work to a final solution, and his final solution could have been that the bloody thing was too wide The impact can be entirely beneficial It depends on how the artist views it. Meanwhile, as Malcolm Rifkind argues on page 31, President George Bush and Mr Blair must keep an open mind on the need for a more federal Iraqi state, if that is the only way to accommodate Sunni resentment of Shia domination..

Yet British and US troops must stay because the consequences of withdrawal are still worse. Mr Blair’s simplistic picture of Iraq overlooks, too, the extent to which the presence of foreign troops inflames Iraqi nationalism, albeit of a Sunni-tinged variety. The supposed defenders of democracy have been guilty of human rights abuses, and the allegation that Marines deliberately shot Iraqi civilians is only the latest of a long line of charges against US and British forces. This is not because the violence there is a struggle between terrorism and democracy – that is much too simple. Which is unfortunate, because it undermines the credibility of his message, much of which is right – despite his responsibility for turning Iraq into a charnel house in the first place British and American forces do have a duty to stay in Iraq. Elections, a referendum, a largely symbolic hand-over of sovereignty to the Iraqis: this time it was the formation of a national unity government. Mr Blair’s optimism is beginning to look like desperation at some distance from reality.