No peace, no honour, no apologies. A shorter precis of Gordon Brown's announcement of further troop withdrawals from Iraq could probably be achieved, but it hasn't come to me. We are witnessing the beginning of the end and not, whatever the Prime Minister would have us believe, the end of the beginning. We quit, Iraqis remain, bloodshed and terror continue.

Cast your mind back. Even before the big lies were uttered the consequences were predicted and predictable. It took no great acuity (on my part, at least) to say that democracy could not be delivered like some self-assembly flat pack, that resistance, civil war and Islamist terrorism were the likeliest outcomes.

It required no cynicism, either, to conclude that they lied again when they said they had believed sincerely - and were therefore excused from blame - in all the untruths. The great WMD fraud is an old story now, but it set the pattern. First create the catastrophe, then blame the catastrophe.

A comparative reading of Hansard and the undisputed reporting of Bob Woodward and others gives a flavour of the crime. Even when Tony Blair was assuring the Commons that Britain had no interest in regime change in Iraq, he knew an invasion was being planned. He knew because he had volunteered British troops.

No cynicism, just incredulity. The liberal interventionists still slander anyone who opposed the war before it began. You can only blame the murders of Iraqi interpreters on Britain and America, wrote the Observer's Nick Cohen at the weekend, "if you recognise a fascistic version of Islamism as the resistance' or wish that Saddam Hussein had remained in power".

Estimates of civilian Iraqi deaths run from a modest quarter of a million to a full million. Four million survivors have been "displaced". Islamo-fascists - a nonsensical ideological hybrid, but let it pass - have slaughtered a great many with an insane zeal. But how many? Most? So what has been our share?

Ask better questions. How many would have died if there had been no invasion? How many would yet die, and how many more American and British troops would be required, to satisfy Cohen's definition of victory? What's his price?

Saddam's butchery has been matched easily since his statue was toppled in Baghdad. A price worth paying? Blame the brutality of those who resist - the word does not depend on liberal approval - all you like. Blame perverted creeds, sadistic gangsterism, corrupt police, foreign fighters, power-hungry factions: there is an abundance of proof. The fact remains: the slaughter has been a consequence of invasion, of a fiasco born of arrogance, duplicity and stupidity. We did that.

Back, then, to Mr Brown. On Monday he told the Commons that a British withdrawal could not be seen as an admission of defeat. The Prime Minister said: "When we announce fewer troops in Iraq, it is because we are winning the security battle and there is a lull in some of the fighting that has taken place in Iraq. We hope it is a permanent lull." A permanent lull: that counts, I think, as a new strategic concept. It is less astonishing, though, than a little four-letter word. Hope. As in, "we hope". That's all, even when we are "winning the security battle"? Mr Brown, having supported the war and the occupation throughout, evacuates troops mid-victory on the basis of mere hope? How often has that proved reliable in Iraq?

Test the chances this time around. Yardsticks are easy to come by. Attacks on British troops - already withdrawn from Basra to the city's airport - have certainly diminished. Assassinations and beatings of Iraqis continue. Three factions, at least, are involved in the killings for political, tribal and "religious" reasons, unhindered by the British. It is civil war in all but name. When British numbers are cut to 2500 next spring those who remain will be incapable of patrolling even the Iranian border, as the government admits.

By the end of next year, in all probability, another of Britain's Mesopotamian adventures will have been concluded. Perhaps 12 months have therefore been allowed for Mr Brown's hope to be fulfilled. But if the security battle is, indeed, being won, we may as well apply the crudest yardstick of all.

Why, when announcing the withdrawal, did the Prime Minister also say that many of the 15,000 people who have worked for British forces over four-and-a-half years, interpreters in particular, will be able to apply for resettlement in the UK? If Basra is becoming peaceful, why offer refuge?

There are 30,000 Iraqi security personnel in Basra. No-one, save a Prime Minister making his escape from folly, believes they will be ready to take control for years. Britain's generals, desperate to free resources for Afghanistan, will nonetheless give the government the advice it wants to hear. But who will dare to say "mission accomplished"?

Reconstruction was among the first of the west's justifications for occupation. That was reconstruction as in "rebuilding anything we bombed flat or brought to ruin when applying years of sanctions against our former ally, Saddam". The tales of stolen billions - dollars not pounds, admittedly - are well-documented. Iraq was looted, not rebuilt, and the oil that was supposed to settle accounts is still not flowing at pre-war levels.

Insurgents have done most of the damage, obviously enough. But if the security war is, indeed, won, or close to being won, where are the government ministers boasting of the fruits of victory? In Basra and elsewhere the infrastructure is still fragile, to put it kindly, where it survives. Yet if peace, or near-peace, has been achieved the dividends should surely be visible. That is not the case. Mr Brown knows it, too. So a few troops will hang around, most of them in Kuwait, to calm American domestic opinion until the entire British focus shifts to Afghanistan and another futile campaign advertised, without a blush, as essential to the future of civilisation. The Prime Minister intends that we should forget about Iraq.

We will, in time, but not while he persists with untruths and half truths. There is no victory in sight. There is no hope in an American surge that depends on recruiting willing gunmen to tribal militias obedient - only just, only for now, only out of sheer opportunism - to White House urgings and bribes. Basra, meanwhile, witnesses the beginnings, not the end, of a bloody struggle for local power.

Some people object, justifiably, when I write about Iraq in terms of what "we" have done. Those people said "not in my name", and they meant it. Iraqis can be forgiven for failing to make the distinction.

Can you blame them? It was done. It was done in our names. Mr Brown's greatest offence this week had nothing to do with announcing a withdrawal and everything to do with failing to admit, finally, what has been done.

We made a wasteland. He calls it peace. At the beginning of the end, in decency, he could have tried honesty instead. Is it really too early for the truth, or too late?