Saved! Only days now until Silvio Berlusconi launches the construction of a giant barrier to prevent the frequent flooding from the lagoon. Just think: soon we won’t have to eat any more of those damn pizzas. Hmm, we find ourselves thinking, Italian construction projects Hmm, Silvio Berlusconi Hmm, Venice still sinking. Hmm, some think the barrier will make the lagoon stagnate.And then, with a sigh worthy of any Italian, we recall that this is how it has always been with La Serenissima, hope and beauty mingling with doubt and whispers and serpentine dealing Waiter: un’altra pizza per favore, presto!.

It was an astute if obvious idea to appoint as Labour Party chairman someone who is regarded by the party as one of them. Ian McCartney is Labour to the core, unlike John Reid, the intellectual former Communist, or Charles Clarke, who has been the leader’s bruiser since he worked for Neil Kinnock in 1983. The war in Iraq has not simply separated Mr Blair from his party; it has distanced him from a wider swath of opinion that has its doubts about his slavish adherence to President Bush’s foreign policy.Making concessions to appease the Labour Party’s domestic obsessions is no way to heal those wounds. As we report today, the Prime Minister has backed off the idea of “co-payment” between taxpayer and patient in the NHS. While it may make sense to beat a hasty retreat from a carelessly-worded phrase, the principles of Mr Blair’s market-oriented reforms in health and education are sound.Once the war is over, the best way to restore confidence among the doubters is not to throw scraps to the conservatives of the Labour Party. It is to deal with the wider concerns about the effects of war, the welfare of the Iraqi people, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the threat of terrorism and the future of international law.Yesterday’s reshuffle was only a start After the war, Mr Blair needs to rearrange the pack again.

Apart from ditching the hapless Geoff Hoon, who has acquitted himself miserably as Secretary of State for Defence, he needs to show generosity to the conscientious objectors in his parliamentary party.He should, for example, offer a route back into government to John Denham, the junior Home Office minister who, if anything, delivered a more eloquent resignation speech than Robin Cook.. Wars often have their phoney phases, but what is strange about this one is that no one can be sure whether it is about to begin or about to end. With no reporters embedded in Saddam’s Republican Guard, the curious feature of this most-televised of wars has been the invisibility of the Iraqi forces.The war has so far consisted only of skirmishes, not battles. The advance on Baghdad has not been a military offensive so much as an exercise in long-distance driving – on what seem to be remarkably well-maintained and signposted roads.Some of Saddam Hussein’s tactics seem obvious – at least, with the benefit of two weeks’ hindsight. Faced with the vast technological superiority of the Allies and their total control of the air, he has avoided confrontation out in the open and kept his troops hidden among civilians in the cities. The battle for Baghdad will probably be nothing like two of the most recent examples of low-casualty wars fought by American-led coalitions, in Kuwait and Kosovo.

In both cases, the occupying forces did not believe that they were fighting to defend their homeland.Although thousands of civilians are now on the move out of the Iraqi capital, it is telling that there have been so few refugees trying to leave the country. Reporters sent to the Jordanian border to meet them found themselves interviewing people going the other way, saying they wanted to fight for Iraq under Saddam.The 24-hour news coverage from the very cockpit of the conflict provides the illusion of an open war, yet the endless television pictures cannot tell us what we need to know, which is what is going on in the minds of Saddam, his commanders and his soldiers.We must hope that Saddam has already gone and that the edifice of his totalitarian rule is on the point of collapse; but we should fear and prepare for the worst. Either way, getting a grip on the aid operation through Umm Qasr is obviously a priority. Either way, the campaign that matters is not and has never been about smart weapons, overwhelming force or military strategy. It is about convincing the Iraqi people that they will regain national dignity only by getting rid of Saddam and the Baath party – and using the power of American imperialism to secure control over their own destiny.That was always going to be a difficult campaign – far harder even than street-by-street battles to seize control of Iraq’s great cities.. 130,000 British and American troops are in action in Iraq from a total force of 250,000 in the Gulf.