About this grim business in Iraq that will be dominating the world’s headlines in an increasingly unfortunate way for some time to come: there’s good news on at least one front.

Freedom and democracy are affirming themselves in one crucial zone — the U.S. political arena, where the Congress and the media are finally taking control of the debate away from the manipulative and authoritarian Bush administration.

Of course, there’s still a certain resistance to dragging the full truth and its implications out in the open, as when Senator John McCain calls for more troops in Iraq “because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.”

But what’s on the cusp of being said openly — and no doubt will be in the next few weeks or months — is that when you calculate everything (including the hundreds of billions of dollars in costs) the U. S. is actually losing the war; that a classic mistake of historic proportions has been made in invading Iraq; and that the first step towards redressing the situation is not merely the resignation of the secretary of defence but the removal of the entire Bush government.

By “classic mistake,” let’s understand that peculiar illusion, repeated many times throughout history, that if you show up more or less unprovoked outside alien gates with a large army, the people inside will believe you when you proclaim your good intentions and your superior ways.

Think of Napoleon setting off to liberate the poor serfs chafing under the Tsarist yoke in 1812, expecting a hero’s welcome. He found only scorched earth, as Moscow and environs had been evacuated along with the foodstuffs, animals and materiel needed to support his army of nearly a half million. Trekking back in a brutal winter, only 10,000 made it and Napoleon had met his first Waterloo.

Or Benedict Arnold’s and Richard Montgomery’s American armies, reaching Quebec City in the winter of 1776 to liberate the habitants from the British yoke. The French Canadians sided with the British and the campaign was a disaster. Or, for that matter, the British proposing to “liberate” Iraq from the Turkish yoke after the First World War. History is littered with this stuff.

The uproar over prisoner abuse and torture, and the barbaric response of the Islamic extremists who responded by beheading an American, has created a new crisis for the already threadbare logic of invasion. Even that last fabricated argument — “getting rid of a dictator” — is on its last legs, as the mayhem now unfolding is arguably as bad as if Saddam, who had no major weapons and was going nowhere anyway, had been left alone to meet a tyrant’s fate on his own somewhere down the road.

The final appeal is still to “our values” — freedom and democracy. These are our political values and are indeed unquestionably superior to tyranny and must be defended against real threats — not only terrorists, but those who would subvert constitutional safeguards in the battle against terrorists.

What the Islamic world sees and resists, however, are our dominant cultural values — money-worship, technology-worship, rampant pornography, the pursuit of frivolity while the world starves, not to mention our Western history of highly undemocratic imperial interventions. When everything is added up on the human scale, we are not superior to anybody.

Besides, when George W. Bush proclaims “freedom and democracy,” he hardly does it in the true sense of the term. If the Iraqi adventure with its deceptions and manipulations is any indication, he does it in the same general vein as Islamic extremists when they holler out “God is great.” You can’t argue with either proposition, and both of them actually mean something else. What they mean is: If you don’t agree with me, I’ll beat your brains out.

After the worst is admitted, the world can then concentrate on helping the U.S. remove its leg from this self-made trap. If he were wise, George W. Bush would reverse his catastrophic policy and expedite the healing process. At the Napoleonic level, however, apparently you can’t do that. And there are still six long months until the U.S. election in November.