ANTHONY Charles Lynton Blair, according to the copy of Who's Who that sits red and imposing on my windowsill like a high court judge, was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1976. It was the culmination of a long and expensive educational journey by way of Fettes and Oxford.

Judging by the events of this week, he should ask for his money back. For the prime minister seems to have emerged from these years oblivious to such basic concepts as the right to a fair trial.

How else does one explain his condemnation of pictures showing the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners as "shocking and appalling"while court proceedings are active?

It may have taken him more than a week to comment on the tsunami disaster, but in this case he was out with a soundbite at the speed of light.

In fairness, he did briefly refer to the contents of the photographs as "the alleged abuse", but the subtlety was rather lost amid the torrent of praise which followed for the Army as a whole. The "vast majority" of those serving in Iraq had done so with "distinction, courage and with great honour to this country", he told MPs. The message was clear. This was an isolated incident, few bad apples, nothing else to see, move along ladies and gentlemen, please.

He was not the only one rushing to judgment. General Sir Mike Jackson, head of the British Army, held a press conference the day before in which he, too, stressed how uncommon were such allegations of mistreatment.

No-one doubts the general's right to appear before the cameras when he feels like it - he did the same at the time of the Daily Mirror's fake pictures scandal - but on this occasion his timing was astonishing. It was as if the Archbishop of Canterbury had chosen to issue a general condemnation of killing on the same day a jury was about to deliver its verdict in a murder trial.

Little wonder the judge in the case being heard in Germany asked yesterday for no more public statements.

Arguably, Mr Blair could not help but comment on the pictures once they were in the public domain. But he has shown no such qualms in the past about staying selectively schtum once an inquiry - be it Hutton on Kelly or Budd on Blunkett - was under way. So why come out fighting with such ferocity now?

One could not listen to his comments, and those of several other politicians, without hearing the unmistakable sound of another great British clean-up operation getting under way. A delicate lifting of the rug, a gentle sweep of the muck and a year from now no-one will ever remember this messy interlude in the tale of how British forces helped to liberate Iraq.

And it has been a bit of a tale right from the start. British forces, according to reports, were not like those American grunts. They wore berets. They learned the local lingo. They handed out sweets to children.

All true. Yet it also emerged this week that in May 2003, shortly after the invasion, the Army was so concerned about reports of civilians being mistreated that it issued a general order reminding troops that they must treat detainees with "humanity and dignity".

What had gone wrong?

According to the officer who revealed the existence of the order to the court-martial in Germany, the Army had taken 3000 prisoners on the battlefield and 1000 were civilians.

"There was no difficulty with them, " he said, "but once we moved into an occupation situation, things changed."

Things changed. It is a phrase that could easily be deployed to explain how the so-called war on terror as it has been applied to Iraq has gone so wrong. The coalition went in to find weapons of mass destruction.

But things changed. It went in to topple a dictator and bring human rights to an oppressed people. But as we know from Abu Ghraib, things changed. It had a grand plan for democratic elections. Now, with the largest four of 18 provinces in such chaos that voting will likely not take place in them, things will have to change again.

Things keep changing, it seems. Yet countries and armies do not lose theirway all of a sudden. Some magnetic force has messed with the moral compass. Blame it on Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib or dodgy dossiers. Trace it right back to the murderers who perpetrated September 11.

At whatever point it occurred, the path back home is receding further into the gloom.

Then again, as the prime minister put it so elegantly in his barrister-like way: "The difference between democracy and tyranny is not that in a democracy bad things don't happen, but that in a democracy, when they do happen, people are held and brought to account."

But of the two leaders who invaded Iraq in search of WMD that did not exist, one is celebrating the beginning of his second term and the other, barring a meteor strike, is about to begin a historic third.

Perhaps we might borrow one of Mr Blair's old law books to discover what justice there is in any of that.