How short memories are. Less than 11 weeks ago, President Bush stood before Congress - watched by an already exhausted-looking Tony Blair - and pledged a worldwide war against all terrorism. The war, we were told, would pursue all terrorists with any kind of international reach; in particular, it would target Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, which was thought to have cells in 60 countries spread across five continents. But there were scores of other international terrorist organisations, too, and the US pledged to eradicate them from the face of the earth. In his address, Bush thanked Blair and referred to him as "friend".
Britain, since then, has been humiliatingly sidelined. The thousands of British troops Blair was keen to involve were brushed aside, the Bush administration making it clear that they were surplus to requirements. Humanitarian programmes, urged by Britain, were also brusquely dismissed by Washington. Australia, Japan, Turkey, France and Italy got in on the act by contributing troops. Peace talks organised by the United Nations were held in Germany, rather than Britain. Last Monday, John Ashcroft, the administration's attorney general, thanked Spain for its "excellent work" in tracking down al-Qaeda activists - without so much as a mention for poor old Britain.
And that worldwide war against terrorism? It was swiftly transmuted in American minds into a war against Afghanistan, and in particular to a relentless bombing campaign against a group almost no one had heard of - "the Taliban". Few doubted that al-Qaeda would still flourish, with or without Osama Bin Laden or a handful of cohorts in Afghanistan, but in an astonishingly short time, "the Taliban" became the identified enemy. As Bush said last Monday: "We're smoking 'em out, they're running, and now we're going to bring 'em to justice." His defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said straightforwardly that he would like to see captured members of the Taliban killed. In the triumphalism that followed the routing of the Taliban in Kabul, Business Week magazine emoted freely: "The scenes of joy in the streets of Kabul evoke nothing less than the images of Paris liberated from the Nazis."
Perhaps America needed a pyrrhic but none the less cathartic "victory" to avenge the atrocities of 11 September; there was so much anger, so much fear and so much hubris, that there was a national need to celebrate the defeat of a foe, real or imagined. With Thanksgiving Day on 22 November - traditionally the biggest holiday of the year - that catharsis finally arrived. Even the constant rumble of patrolling F-16s eased in the skies over Washington and New York. There was (and remains) a widespread assumption that the assaults on Afghanistan were carried out with few or no civilian casualties.
So how did Blair miscalculate so badly? Partly, I suspect, he has a genuine evangelical zeal to do good in the world - but these ideals are magnified by notions of self-aggrandisement that he understands less well. He seriously underestimated the desire for Old Testament retribution here; the callousness of Rumsfeld at his press conferences is not a parody or a joke, but a very real reflection of that American determination to get revenge with spilt blood. An American film actor called David Keith, on an official morale-boosting trip to sailors on board the USS Carl Vinson, put it vividly: "You are our fists to smash their mouths, and our teeth that rip off their throats," he roared to them. "People in America want you to bring hell, fire and damnation to those sorry SoBs who did that to us. When you come home and march, you should swagger."
Who or what will be next remains to be seen (or even decided, given the shambolic way the administration is living from day to day). Rumsfeld, strutting his new macho-celebrity status in Florida last Tuesday, singled out Somalia and Yemen as possible new targets. The rubble of Somalia, just as diplomatic efforts to meld a semblance of peace there are taking shape, would be meat as easy for the cluster bombs of the B-52s as Afghanistan has so far been; in American eyes, strikes against Yemen would help avenge the suicide attack there on the USS Cole in October last year.
Should the US be serious in its efforts to smash al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia and Egypt would be much more logical targets for American aggression. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers of 11 September came from Saudi Arabia; Mohammed Atta, said to have been the ringleader and the pilot of the second plane to smash into the World Trade Center, was Egyptian. Although the governments of both countries are strong supporters of the US, their populations tend to be strongly anti-American.
Pakistan was brushed aside by the Bush administration in favour of India earlier this year, only to be courted avidly after 11 September, when expediency dictated. Yet already the US has broken pledges to Pakistan to see that Pakistani nationals caught up in Afghanistan are returned. In the immortal words of the US ambassador to France, 71-year-old Howard Leach (a former food-processing magnate from California who is also a Republican donor): "Countries' priorities change with the facts at any given time." Quite, Mr Ambassador: you have neatly summed up the approach of an administration that was determinedly isolationist, but which has been forced out of its shell.
This too, I believe, is where Blair misunderstood US intentions. Americans will love him as long as he is unquestioningly on board for their ride, but if he wants to become namby-pamby about humanitarian aid or the like, he will quickly fall into disfavour. If the hawks at the Pentagon (led by Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and opposed by Colin Powell at the State Department) succeed in their agitation to make Iraq the next major target of US aggression, Blair will have a dilemma on his hands: the British Foreign Office firmly takes the Powellite line. Perhaps Blair's real test will come if and when he is forced publicly to renounce US policy and thus forgo American adulation.
It was less than 11 weeks ago that he was invited to stand before Congress by the US president, but he was then already engaged in a rapidly changing situation involving not only international expediency, but the need for domestic catharsis here. As, I suspect, he is belatedly realising.
