Britain’s Foreign Minister, Jack Be Nimble (real name “Straw,” seriously), swelled up like a puff adder this week and announced that the notion that there was any link between the first London bombings and Britain’s presence in Iraq was “astonishing.” (And after that even before more bombs went off in the tube.) Tony Blair said it would be a “misunderstanding of a catastrophic order” to think that, if he had kept well away from Iraq, the killers wouldn’t have gone to Pakistan for bomb lessons. (It was a misunderstanding shared by the nation’s own anti-terrorist forces, an embarrassing leak promptly revealed.)

The Defence Secretary, John Reid, stood “shoulder to shoulder,” as New Labour puts it, with Jack and Tony, and said, “The idea that somehow by running away from the school bully, then the bully will not come after you is a thesis that is known to be completely untrue by every kid in the playground.” (I imagine little Harry Potters all over London wiping their bloody noses and saying with a quaver, “Well, that thesis was thoroughly disproved.”)

Mr. Reid seemed to think that bully Iraq was aiming to give little Britain a kicking with those famous weapons of mass destruction. Does he mean that a Britain at peace would have attracted suicide bombers anyway because they’re contrarians, attacking places they like, to keep us off-kilter?

John, Jack and Tony were furious because a think-tank said the suicide bombs were a result of the Iraq war. Britain cannot prevent terrorism while it “is riding as a pillion passenger with the U.S.” (This is the snide British version of “shoulder to shoulder.”)

But 64 per cent of Londoners agree. After both bomb attacks, Londoners said, “See, I said that would happen. The minute Tony started lurking with that brainless boy George, it would end in tears, I said. Drop bombs on Iraqis and it’ll be the Irish all over again.”

And they were right.

Canadians said it too. “Jean, that George is up to no good. You’re not going to Iraq with him and that’s final.” Especially not after Afghanistan when George bombed us even as we stood shoulder to shoulder with them.

If there’s one phrase I never want to hear again in my lifetime, it’s “shoulder to shoulder.” Everyone’s used it, including Karl Marx. It sounds like it’s from the Rocket Robin Hood theme song, or should be. I used to sing it as a kid. “Band of brothers marching together, heads held high in all kinds of weather.” I’ll spare you the rest. The fact that Tony or George got fired up over it as adults is, well, it’s troubling.

Here comes the proof. The Kurds set off bombs in Turkey this week, Jack said, and Turkey isn’t in Iraq. So the Iraq mess hasn’t spread. No connection there.

Many things are unconnected. When Henry II howled, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” and someone did, Henry must have said, “I meant another priest entirely.” No connection, just as there’s no connection between pollution and global warming or between what you did last night and the baby showing up nine months later. I seek proof.

Let me simplify, as one must in these cartoon-term wars. I visited friends last weekend on their farm (to sprinkle deerfly bites on my sunstroke, since you ask) and saw Tony Blair’s anime reasoning in action.

My seven-year-old friend Buzz has a new fish. His little brother James wants a new fish too. But James already has a fish. If he didn’t, his chances of getting a new one would be improved, James might well reason. (Small boys do not share my belief that all fish are identical.)

Suddenly, surprisingly, in the middle of the night, an entire box of fish food is poured into the tank of James’s fish, which turns belly-up. The tank looks as though someone has vomited into it.

“I need a new fish,” says James, whose mischief-meter face is turned to high even as he sleeps. No, the parents say. We don’t negotiate with fish-bombers. Who could do such a thing to an innocent fish?

All faces turn to James, who does a good Tony Blair for a five-year-old. He finds it astonishing that anyone should suggest a link between the two events. Pet-icide is a shocking act that is anathema to children. Buzz, looking wise and not a bit smug, appears to be playing the hugely popular London mayor, Ken Livingstone.

I am not equating the terrible suffering of the London and Iraqi bombing victims with the death of a fish. Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair are. That’s how they think. I don’t know how Brits are reacting. They have been lied to so many times. The emperor’s nudity has been a headline on every newspaper except the Daily Mail, which is not even a newspaper. And now they are being told that British suicide bombings and British wars in the Middle East are but strangers in the night.

John, Jack and Tony made these bald-faced statements in a week that saw 22 car bombs in Baghdad alone, including 10 on a single day. Civil war has broken out in Iraq, as the Sunni Muslims target the Shiites in a 50-degree cauldron stirred to a molten hell by the Americans.

American and British politicians are telling lies so shameless that even a six-year-old looks at the ground as he tells them. Karl Rove didn’t take revenge on a diplomat by outing his CIA wife. There is evidence he did, but nothing follows from that. There’s no connection.

The deaths of Londoners mean as much to Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair as the simultaneous deaths of hundreds of Iraqis. It is as nothing.

There’s a reason why politicians put on an act as they pontificate about the gore and viscera that spout from the wars they start. No one ever calls them on it. No one ever votes them out into the wasteland that is their true, dusty, heartless, airless home.