There's no reason to think it wouldn't have been just about equally catastrophic, if not more so.

The difficulty didn't lie in getting to Baghdad and occupying it - it was in what to do afterwards.

Of course there would have been the difference that it wouldn't have been Dubya in the White House, and that is quite a difference. It's hard to imagine anyone else screwing things up quite so badly.

But if we imagine George Senior launching an illegal operation on that scale (without even the backing his son got from other countries), we are implicitly imagining that George Senior has been transformed into as impressive a figure as his son has turned out to be...