Here's a dinner-party talking point that can run and run, certainly until November and, if the Democrats win the US presidency, for several months beyond. Would John Kerry, far from quickly bringing US troops home, keep them in Iraq even longer than George Bush?
My answer, regrettably, is yes - which means that the Democratic convention in Boston later this month will be a sad affair for the people of Iraq, where polls consistently show a majority in favour of early withdrawal.
Kerry agrees with most Iraqis on one thing. Until April 10 last year the US invasion was a success. Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in three weeks with relatively low casualties. The definition of "low" can be challenged, but, setting the war's illegality aside, the toll was less than Iraqis feared.
Since then, however, the failures outweigh the successes, starting with the occupation troops' unreadiness to curb the predicted waves of looting, leading to the massive increase in insecurity. Since Bush declared an end to major combat, 735 US troops have died. Six thousand Iraqis have lost their lives. Tens of thousands have been detained without trial for months.
With the exception of the Kurds, even those Iraqis who were grateful for the invasion have largely changed their minds. They resent the occupation, though it has officially ended. And the sight of foreign troops on the streets maintains that anger.
Whether led by secular nationalists or Iraqi Islamists, the insurgency ebbs and flows. There is no evidence to suggest it is on a clear downward trend. Foreign Islamists using terrorist methods are operating in Iraq in a way that never occurred under Saddam Hussein. The US occupation has been a magnet rather than a deterrent.
The US has had some success in making pluralistic politics possible in Iraq and preparing the ground for genuinely contested elections in January. Public debate in the pages of Iraq's many newspapers and on its radio call-in programmes is unprecedented. It is too early to tell how free the election campaign will be, and whether violence, intimidation and tribal loyalties will be strong factors in controlling people's choices. It is certainly premature to predict the results, even on a crude scale of whether broadly secular or broadly religious groups will do best.
Whichever parties or personalities come out on top, they are likely to want US troops to withdraw, as soon as - and this is the crucial variable - Iraqi forces have been built up. But since the US military presence provokes resistance as well as suppresses some of it, there is infinite elasticity here for any US president to play with. He can argue that Iraqi forces are not ready to handle things and, by declining to start a phased pull-out of US troops, maintain the environment of insecurity that makes timid Iraqi politicians cling to the US presence.
Given this analysis, what would Bush do if he won a second term? The conventional view is that he is one of the most ideologically, even religiously driven, presidents of modern times. He would pursue his pre-emptive war on terror in Iraq and beyond.
But there is another possibility. Iraq has been a millstone for the past year and a half, and he might well choose to declare victory and withdraw. Iraq's January election provides the perfect escape hatch. We have brought Iraq to the first democratic poll in its history and now we move out, he could announce, as he sets a timetable for a three-month withdrawal. Whatever mess follows, he would argue that it was no longer his responsibility. The US gave Iraq its freedom, and that means the freedom to make mistakes.
Kerry, by contrast, looks increasingly like the candidate with the long-term imperial agenda. It would not be as raw as the one pushed by Bush's neoconservative apostles of privatisation, but it would be imperial none the less, dressed in the classic garb of Democratic party multilateral interventionism.
In speech after speech Kerry has laid the ground work for expanding and prolonging the US presence in Iraq. It starts with macho bluster. "Extremists appear to be gaining confidence and have vowed to drive our troops from the country. We cannot - and will not - let that happen," he thundered in a radio address on April 17. Then comes the mission statement: "It would be unthinkable for us to retreat in disarray and leave behind a society deep in strife and dominated by radicals" (from the same broadcast). What happens if Iraqis elect radicals in January? Will they not be allowed to take power?
At Fulton in Missouri, the site of Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, Kerry laid out his vision for extra troops. "If our commanders believe they need more American troops, they should say so and they should get them ... But more and more American soldiers cannot be the only solution ... The coalition should organise an expanded international security forces, preferably with Nato, but clearly under US command," he said on April 30.
In a Washington Post article on Sunday, he attacked Bush for not having "a realistic plan to win the peace and bring our troops home". Did he produce one of his own? No, he made it clear the expanded foreign force would stay for years. "Our goal should be an alliance commitment to deploy a major portion of the peacekeeping force that will be needed in Iraq for a long time to come," he said.
Nato could be mobilised to help stabilise Iraq "and the region", he went on. Does he have his eye on Iran and Syria too? The price of inaction would be heavy, he warned at Fulton. Trying to frighten his allies, he raised the stakes higher than Bush has, saying: "For the Europeans, Iraq's failure could endanger the security of their oil supplies, further radicalise their large Muslim populations, threaten destabilising refugee flows, and seed a huge new source of terrorism."
The notion of Bush as an ideologue and Kerry as a realist is too simple. Each has elements of both, and it may well be that a second-term Bush would recognise the cost of his first term's mistakes. Flushed by victory, Kerry might be less clear-sighted.
One leading Democratic expert, Zbigniew Brzezinski, takes the line that the US should withdraw from Iraq by mid-2005. But most advisers now gathering round Kerry are missionaries who believe not so much in a war on terror as in a war on state failure. Failed states produce terrorism, they argue, so you have to go to the source.
The notion is more dangerous, since the number of target-countries for uninvited nation-building is bigger. The issue is not whether military intervention is unilateral, as with Bush, or multilateral, as with Kerry, but why neither sees that it nearly always makes things worse.