So he thinks it’s all over… President Bush’s premature announcement of victory in Iraq

May 2003: Robert Fisk is sceptical about George W Bush’s announcement. On the ground the reality is clearer

The former president addresses the US aboard the USS ‘Abraham Lincoln’ (AFP/Getty)

So, it’s the end of the war in Iraq, is it? If anyone thinks George Bush Jnr could pass that one off aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln last week – “major combat operations have ended” was the expression he used on Thursday night – they should take a closer look at Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld’s cosy, sinister little speech to US troops in Baghdad a day earlier.

It was filled with all the usual mythmaking: the “many” Iraqis who flocked to welcome the Americans on their “liberation” of Baghdad, the “fastest march on a capital in modern military history” (which the Israelis achieved in three days in 1982).

But the key line was slipped in at the end. The Americans, he said, still had “to root out the terrorist networks operating in this country”. What? What terrorist networks? And who, one may ask, are behind these mysterious terrorist networks “operating” in Iraq?