Some of the imams know that they will have to deal with the immense power of Washington if they are to

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Some of the imams know that they will have to deal with the immense power of Washington if they are to have a stable Iraq; others believe a jihad will drive the Americans out and deliver a devout and successful Islamic state Wrong. It will deliver an independent but even more war-ravaged and impoverished state with the prospect of civil war with minority groups such as the Kurds and the Sunni.A lot depends now on how the Americans respond to the growing Islamic movement. If they try to crack down, they will face a guerrilla war and will eventually lose. They should realise too that this movement has a distinctly nationalist tone: don't overplay the role of Shia Iran in the growing militancy inside Iraq. The idea of Iraq becoming a theocracy ruled under strict Islamic law is scary for a lot of reasons, not least because the Iraqi people as a whole have lived for far too long with the imposition of absolute truths by an unquestioned elite.

I mistrust anybody who promises me Utopia; it always ends up being built on skulls and bones.But there degrees of Islamic state and the Americans need to show they are not scared of engaging with the clerics and the political groups around them. There are signs that some on the American side and certainly the British realise this Yet as I write I have a feeling I might be the naive one. Perhaps the moment of logic has passed, missed in the run-up to war when the world was convulsed by diplomatic mud-wrestling at the United Nations, and ignoring the most pressing question of all: who would rule Iraq when the monster was, inevitably, driven from power.The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent. Public humiliation is certainly easier to stomach if afterwards you can console yourself with a session of retail therapy to the tune of Â£10,000.

That, apparently, is how much David Beckham spent on clothes after being sentenced to 45 minutes in the stocks last Wednesday night with millions of people hurling rotten fruit at him. He was sitting on the subs' bench during the first half of the championship match between Man U and Real Madrid at Old Trafford but I bet from his point of view it felt equally bad.It's his wife I feel sorry for, of course Dear Victoria and their two lovely children Alfa and Romeo I know exactly how they feel. We're talking oaks and acorns here but when, last year, my 12-year-old son who plays rugby for his school was dropped from the A team to the B team, the weight of his misery and mortification, heavy as a horse blanket, hung just as suffocatingly on me as it did on him.I tried everything: retail therapy, of course (not quite on the Beckham scale but, at the end of the day, as I'm sure Becks would agree, a new pair of socks is a new pair of socks), supper at Pizza Express, a weekend without going to see Granny, even a contract to take out Mr Bettinson, the sports master, or Tommy, the boy who had replaced him as scrum half. No dice.Finlay, who I need hardly say was named at his father's insistence after the famous Scottish international Finlay Calder, was inconsolable. Compared to my son's suffering, Satan's demotion from Premier Division, Heaven to Third Division, Hell in Paradise Lost was little more than a yellow card, a glitch, a superficial graze needing no more than a dab of Savlon and a waterproof plaster.Thank God he's back in the As with, one hopes, a rather more compassionate attitude for the underdog than before.I've lost count of the times I've been publicly humiliated. There was the night I tripped, eight months pregnant, over the last step leading down to the Dorchester Hotel's crowded cocktail bar and, like a vast woolly sheep on its back, lay there on the floor arms and legs flailing in front of a room full of amused spectators.