I suspect the reports are propaganda to unsettle the leadership.Reports of Republican Guard surrenders are intriguing. Four of its six divisions are reported to have been mauled while much of another has given up. But a formation “destroyed” does not mean everybody is killed, wounded or taken prisoner. It means its cohesion as a fighting force is broken, and its headquarters no longer functions.Remember the early “surrender” of the 51st Division in Basra? The general surrendered, but many of his troops did not and melted into the Basra brickwork. Reports of divisions being “destroyed” can be meaningless.Christopher Bellamy is professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University.

In these parts, the first casualty of war was a decent supply of Perrier water. Within a day of the outbreak of hostilities, signs appeared in the local Safeway announcing that “due to the current world situation”, the management had been obliged to ration bottled water. Security-wise, it was thought that hoarding by a few shoppers might endanger the supply lines to other civilians in Diss. After 11 September, there was a stampede for the few Second World War gas masks on sale in the local army surplus store, The Quartermaster’s Daughter. When supplies ran out, a panicking local lobbed a brick through the shop window and made off with the last one, which was on display.But more generally there does seem to be a change in the hearts and minds of many of those on the home front.

War does that, of course, but this conflict has a different feel to it. With journalists reporting from both sides of the battle front and cameras following tanks, troops, jets and even missiles through the desert, we at home no longer have the sense that we are helpless onlookers. Peacenik or warmonger, we all somehow feel implicated in what is happening, and right now it feels as if we have reached a moment of change.So how will it be, post-Saddam Britain? A more edgy and fearful place, that’s for sure. The years of peace and easy consumerism will begin to seem like an illusion, more fragile and vulnerable than we had ever imagined at the time.

The problems of troublesome, luckless, distant parts of the world, over which we worried in a vague, unfocused way, will suddenly become our problems. If some of the terrorist alerts of the past two years have not always been justified, they certainly are now. That has been the one sure effect of war on global terrorism – a drastic increase in the risk of global terrorism.In matters of faith and trust, small but significant geological shifts are taking place. For all the efforts of the saintly Rowan Williams, this has been a bad war for the God squad. At the very moment when grand moral arguments have been needed, the words of religious leaders have been drowned out by those of pundits, politicians, even journalists. The Christian cause was not helped by rumours that, as they prepared for war, Bush and Blair prayed together – a truly creepy image. There has been a sense that, for the odd bunch who now hold power in America, this was, for all their denials, something of a holy war waged by the fundamentalist right.Attitudes towards America will change.