The march of folly is underway. Bush and Cheney’s 'war on terror' is now married to Clintonian blueprints for nation-building and social engineering, a wedding officiated over by General Petraeus, whose mythical surge in Iraq was hailed last year by Obama as having "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams".

The fantasy of America’s healing kiss flares in Obama's heart just as it did in Kennedy's. It was General Douglas McArthur who told Kennedy in 1961: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined." True then, true now.