An Iraqi journalist friend told me again today a story he has told me several times before.

It features, so he says, in an upcoming movie, so I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences sharing it.

It was April 2003. Saddam’s statue had fallen in Firdos Square and my friend was hanging around the Méridien hotel in Baghdad, where the Marines were busy setting up base.

He saw three Iraqi Army officers – a couple of generals and a colonel – go into the hotel. Bizarrely, the men were carrying their degree certificates to prove who they were.

A couple of hours later they came out again. Furious. Humiliated.

My friend explained that he was a journalist, working for an English-language paper. He asked them what happened.

They had tried to meet with senior US officers. They had been made to wait, and then they had been dismissed. They had met no one.

They were important men – proud men – but in the captured city, no one inside the makeshift Marine HQ had realised how important. Or how proud. Or what violence injured pride could unleash.

Now, outside, they stopped to speak to the curious young Iraqi from the foreign newspaper.

“Tell your people we didn’t fight because we didn’t want to destroy our city. Tell them the real war starts now.”

Who knows if it makes the cut? And there’s a better story that follows that one. But that’s for him to tell when all the pieces are in place.

IMAGE: Hotel Palestine, central Baghdad, Iraq by jamesdale10.