Mr Blair is right to praise our troops - but he has to justify the war they fought

Even with the best security that the Western world can provide, the Prime Minister's decision to visit British forces in Iraq so soon after the cessation of hostilities was a courageous one, and nothing should detract from that. Not the gleaming Persil-white shirt, nor the baby-kissing, nor the neatly uniformed children singing English nursery rhymes at their reopened school. In lauding the professionalism of the troops, commending their peace-keeping skills and mourning the casualties, Mr Blair's tone was true - even if his description of the Allied victory as a "defining moment" of this - barely three-year-old - century was hyperbole.

The slick stage-management of Mr Blair's flying visit to southern Iraq, however, and the broad smiles that greeted him there belied a host of other, highly disturbing realities. The more that becomes known about the reasons, conduct and consequences of the US and British war, the more clouded becomes the picture of a country that we were told had been liberated from tyranny and of a world saved from the imminent threat of lethal weapons.

The first concern is security. Seven weeks after the formal end of the war, Baghdad is still not secure, nor are many of Iraq's major cities. American soldiers are still dying most days; many Iraqis still fear to leave their homes. For all the Allied protestations that the provision of water, power and communications is getting better all the time, they are still worse for many people than before the conflict began.

The US and Britain blame a resentful minority comprising mostly Baath activists who have yet to accept defeat. But this disregards two incontestable facts. The occupying powers are legally responsible for keeping order and providing the population with the basics of daily life, and they are failing to do this.

The second concern is the quality and use of the intelligence information with which the British and US governments justified the war in the first place. Yesterday we learnt that it is not only Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction that are proving elusive, but that famous Baghdad bunker where he was supposedly staying on the night of the first missile strike. US troops have found no trace of bodies or even a bunker at the site identified by such ultra-reliable intelligence reports that the start of the assault was brought forward by 24 hours.

Responding to charges that Downing Street had distorted intelligence reports in a way that inflated the threat from Iraq's weapons, the British Defence minister Adam Ingram produced only obfuscation. The glaring gap between intelligence and fact, however, calls the legitimacy of the war into question, tarnishes the victory and damages the credibility of the Prime Minister.

The statement by the US Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, that Saddam's weapons were, in effect, only a pretext for war, the lowest common denominator that "everyone could agree on", is - if anything - even worse than the manipulation of intelligence. The clear inference is that Washington cynically used Mr Blair (and tried to use the UN) to give diplomatic cover to a US military adventure that had one selfish aim: facilitating a US withdrawal from Saudi Arabia. If true, that is nothing short of a scandal that will undermine Mr Blair and poison transatlantic relations for a very long time.

On both sides of the Atlantic, but especially here, the politicians, the military and the intelligence services are preparing their defences. A beaming Mr Blair may have been able to celebrate the troops' victory, but his own political war is nowhere near being won.