On May 2nd 2003, George Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln behind a banner saying 'Mission Accomplished' and the next day proclaimed that the "mission is completed". Four years on, and the Iraq war has lasted longer than any US military engagement other than the Revolutionary War and the Vietnam War.
An horrendous death toll mounts inexorably with few signs that the government is establishing its writ. And poll after poll of Americans shows dwindling public support for both the war and its instigator. His ally, Tony Blair, fares little better, political casualties of an imperial folly.
To mark the occasion a hapless Mr Bush has urged his people to be patient. Cautioning that only half of his committed extra 21,500 troops have arrived yet to implement the "surge" strategy, he insisted "this operation is still in the early stages ... the new strategy will take more time to take effect. And there will be good days, and there will be bad days." A model of understatement. He then appealed to Congress for another $100 billion "without strings and without delay" and his spokesman warned he would veto any legislation that attached strict conditions or sought to mandate withdrawal.
The remarkable thing, as former neo-con Francis Fukuyama, pointed out recently, is that the US today spends about as much as the rest of the world combined on its military establishment, and yet is caught in a quagmire without end in this small nation of 24 million. Why, after four years of effort and an outlay of perhaps half-a-trillion dollars, can the US not point to a measure of success, let alone the establishment of the democracy it claimed it was fighting this war for?
The answer is twofold. The project was impossible, and the execution of the impossible project was incompetent beyond belief, exacerbating and accelerating the descent of the country into chaos, creating the very haven of terrorism and instability that Mr Bush and Mr Blair said they wanted to root out.
At the macro level, the idea of regime change, of replacing a brutal tyrant who threatened regional stability and oil supplies, was premised on the notion that the vast majority of Iraqis would greet the US overthrow of Saddam as liberation. Such wishful thinking took no account of the inevitability that such intervention would unleash the pent-up sectarian tensions that the regime held in check.
US and British unilateralism at the UN, their ham-fisted brutality in places like Falluja and Abu Ghraib, and the massive corruption and incompetence of contractors have all undermined any moral legitimacy this brutal adventure might have had. Today all Mr Bush promises is "more of the same" in the guise of a "surge" and a new commander on the ground. He has turned his back on the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's proposals for a timetable for phased withdrawal, and, reports suggest, on advice from London along similar lines. Iraq's prospects, four years on, look, if anything, grimmer.