There is a strange, trivial test available to those of us who are paid to write, sometimes, about tragedy's long, withdrawing roar. How many different ways can you find to write the same thing? People get bored, even in the face of bloody genocide. People get tired of the self-righteousness of the self-appointed. Is there a limit to repetition?

If you wrote much about Ireland, once upon a time, you were obliged to face the problem. Years ago, in this newspaper, in a different incarnation and under a different editorial management, I spent a long year attempting to say that our media's curtailed attention span was no excuse for war crimes in Bosnia. If I had to repeat myself, I would go on repeating myself. Or so I thought, and so I said. Some thought otherwise.

It remains the commentator's problem, nevertheless. How often can you say the same things? At what point is your raised voice dismissed or, worse, discounted? People who care very deeply about certain issues complain that in my trade we are all moral magpies. One week we say X matters most in the world; the very next week X is item 12 on the news schedule, and falling fast.

Academic students of such matters will invoke a "managed consensus", or even a vast, dark, western conspiracy. Nothing is ever so fancy. People just get bored. More importantly, people arrive at their personal conclusions and no longer require a Chomsky, or a Pilger, or (bringing up the rear) even me to tell them what matters to their world.

A little test, and a predictable one. Iraq: what do you think? No adult worth the name can now lack an opinion. You are likely to believe that mistakes have been made, that the inspiration for an invasion was based on a lack of evidence, or that lies have been told. You may have combined these ideas according to taste, and added a couple of your own. Equally, you may still believe that all of it has been worth while, given Saddam's extraordinary sadism. But you know what you think.

So what is each of us to think when the United States House of Representatives votes to demand a start to troop withdrawals from next April? What's our position - contrary, differing, argued honourably - when our new Prime Minister sanctions a junior minister to offer a coded speech in Washington suggesting that Britain's relationship with the US perhaps requires a second look?

I would not, necessarily, inveigh against Douglas Alexander for accepting the role of spear carrier in the latest New Labour school play. A man is entitled to pursue a career. These days, the job of Trade and Development Secretary is quite (but not very) important. If he has been given a task deemed inappropriate to the status of a whole Miliband at the Foreign Office, that's fine by me.

But Alexander was in government when we got into Iraq. More importantly, Gordon Brown was very close to the cardiac infractions of our government when we got into Iraq. If both men have decided suddenly "Hold on a minute", that's OK, and about time. But if the famously combative Gordon did not say those words four years ago, why now?

An obvious reason: he needs the political space. He needs to bury that infamous Blair legacy as quickly (forget decency) as possible. At the top of the list of Brown's pressing tasks as Prime Minister is to get this country out of Iraq while attempting to guess the forthcoming political choices of the people of the US, and while second-guessing the disabled Bush White House. That's geopolitics for beginners.

It is not real politics, though. Real politics demand two things. First, it demands a Prime Minister big enough to say that he disavows the Iraq abomination, and his own complicity in the affair. Secondly, it requires a leader prepared to tell us, and not through a mouthpiece, what he intends to do next. My guess is that Brown is praying for the next US President, and praying - eyes shut and everything - that the winner is a Democrat. Bush is merely mad: one down, but one to go. Our new PM will have to grit his teeth and live with the Madness of Stupid for another year. In the meantime, however, since the Iraq insurgency seems disinclined to abide by our electoral cycles, our head of government will need to begin to explain what he intends about those other folk. That would be the many slaughtered dead.

Remember boredom, and news cycles? Remember the petty allegation that Gordon Brown sat still for Iraq, every step of the horrible way? Or remember the fact, for it is a fact, that most of those in the lower house of America's Congress who have just been voting for troop withdrawal from Mesopotamia once allowed, excused, enabled and cheered the Bush-Blair war? I'd call that a small problem for representative democracy.

I am not interested, especially, in picking nits. The Bush people will probably be wondering this week whether the good headlines can be harvested from, as Nixon once did, "bringing the troops home". (In the early 1960s, Dicky built his candidacy by lamenting a lack of US "effort" in South-east Asia.) Brown's boys and girls may well, meanwhile, be studying Attlee, and Wilson, or Eden, and the thoughts of these men concerning special transatlantic relationships.

Not the point, actually. An awful lot of people have died in Iraq waiting for Gordon Brown to have his shot at effective government. Upwards of 650,000 - I am happy to debate this point of fact with anyone - have perished in the hope that George Bush might retire, or do us all a bigger favour. Democrats in the House, and Douglas Alexander in the Westminster sandpit, did not get where they are today by opposing disgusting wars at the wrong time, or without endorsing the appropriate sanction.

Congress dislikes the loss of young lives? Congress should have thought a little harder a few years ago. Gordon has had second thoughts? What problems existed with his first thoughts? The American-British axis has noticed, finally, that the respective, contributing peoples in the old partnership were never much convinced in the first place? Pay attention.

Wasn't it supposed to be an invasion, an occupation and a counter-insurgency war on democracy's behalf? If the sudden rush to revisionism is to be trusted, two great, free, English-speaking states, with a universal franchise, set about blowing up large pieces of foreign landscape because a pair of lunatics thought it might solve their personal problems. Just that?

This is not novel. If anything, it goes on happening with depressing frequency. In the US and here, nevertheless, we persist in telling ourselves that our unimpeachable democracies, those examples to all fanatics, prevent such anomalies. The House of Representatives wants America's kids home. Prime Minister Brown would prefer if boys from Fife were not being slaughtered. Unless you are bored witless with Iraq, consider only this.

How come we're such exemplary democrats when we cannot even control the appetites of our own leaders? How come we have to wait until it is too late to make amends? Don't we have a vote, or something?