So Dick Cheney was right. In the end, the Iraqi people did respond to American soldiers with flowers. The only trouble was, it was their shipping out, not their digging in, that the Iraqi people celebrated. Today, as US forces marked their formal withdrawal from the towns and cities they invaded more than six years ago, the Iraqi people showed the kind of spontaneous joy the former vice-president once imagined would welcome the 173rd Airborne Brigade. There were streamers and balloons, pop concerts in the park and, yes, flowers – garlanding the abandoned checkpoints of the US military in petals.
Now, as Iraq recedes, it is the country next door that looms ever larger. Handled the wrong way, Iran threatens to define Barack Obama the way Iraq defined George W Bush.
There are some who believe Bush's mistake was not to have shifted his aim eastward: that if he was looking for an oil-rich state in the Persian Gulf with links to terrorism and dreams of weapons of mass destruction then Iran, not Iraq, should have been his target. That kind of talk makes others nervous. They fear that the US might one day repeat the Iraq calamity, with the ayatollahs cast in the role of Saddam Hussein.
Those worriers will hardly find it comforting that the men who agitated for invasion in 2003 are back on the warpath once more: Paul Wolfowitz castigated Obama in the Washington Post earlier this month for taking "a neutral posture" towards the street protesters in Iran, calling on the president to throw all his prestige behind the uprising and against the regime. He wasn't calling for regime change in Tehran, exactly, but Wolfowitz spoke about Iran's rulers the same way he once spoke about Saddam.
Is that a sign of things to come? Put simply, have the events of the last three weeks in Tehran made the prospect of US-led action against Iran – up to and including the use of military force – more or less likely?
At first glance, those advocating regime change seem to have had a boost. The world has just watched a three-week infomercial exposing the brutality of Iran's leaders. If it's not allegations of a stolen election, including the black comedy of Monday's announcement from the Guardian Council that, yes, there had been an error in the count and therefore Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's vote would be revised upward – it's the violence that has followed.
