It must be plain by now that the invasion of Iraq by the United States, Britain, Australia and a few other countries was a huge mistake. Hardly a day goes by without evidence of that.

President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have earned themselves a place in history as either great dupes or liars of gargantuan proportions. As I sit here in London, awaiting a flight to another continent, I read the latest revelations. Iran, it seems, fed false intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to a prominent Iraqi exile leader, who in turn conveyed the information to a Washington cabal hungry for reasons to topple Saddam Hussein.

The Iranian mullahs are giggling through their beards. At a stroke, they helped humiliate the Great Satan, America, and its junior partner Britain, while at the same time ridding their neighbourhood of an evil tyrant. Don't forget that Saddam actually used his chemical weapons against the Iranians in the horrific 80s war between the two countries. Nor should anyone forget that the United States encouraged the Butcher of Baghdad to launch that war against the Ayatollahs because Washington's Axis of Evil didn't include Iraq at that point, just Iran. So intense was the dislike of the Iranian theocracy at the time that American leaders and diplomats turned a blind eye to the use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers.

There's a horrible irony to all of this, if only anyone in Washington could perceive it. Worst of all, from America's point of view, there's not really much that can be done about Iran's perfidy. False intelligence fed to a hostile state falls under the category of what's fair in war, so far as I can tell. Not that the US won't be aggrieved and vengeful against Iran, but the fact is that the ayatollahs and the Wolfowicz-Bush-Rumsfeld faction had a lot in common in their hatred of Saddam. So the words 'just' and 'desserts' spring rather quickly to mind.

Coming on top of the prison torture revelations, this information should help comprehensively sink the Bush-Blair war in public opinion. The people of Britain have long since given up on this adventure. They opposed it beforehand and only gave it their conditional backing when British troops were deployed and needed public support to keep up morale. Now they want their soldiers brought home.

In America, skewed polling samples and data selection suggest that just under half the public want more war. That's not true according to all the people I've spoken to over the past few months. And those who once thought getting rid of Saddam, WMDs or no, was a good thing, are now changing their minds. It's a turning point.