After 9/11: our own low, dishonest decade

Early in The 9/11 Wars, a magisterial history of the last decade, Jason Burke describes a battle in an Iraqi town called Majar al-Kabir, held in June 2003, soon after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The battle was described by press headlines in the UK as the heroic "last stand" of humanitarian-minded British soldiers against a mob of vicious Iraqi insurgents. Abruptly one morning, a British