1) Saddam Hussein is in jail, his sons are in ‘paradise’, and of the 52 faces on the Pentagon’s deck of cards all but nine are now in one or the other of those locations.

2) The coalition casualties in February were the lowest since the war began.

3) Attacks on the Iraqi oil pipelines have fallen by 75 per cent since last autumn, and crude oil production in British-controlled southern Iraq is at 127 per cent of the target set immediately after the war.

4) The prewar potable water supply — 12.9 million litres — has been doubled.

5) The historic marshlands of southern Iraq, environmentally devastated by Saddam, are being restored, and tens of thousands of marsh Arabs have returned to their ancient homeland.

6) Public healthcare funding in Iraq is more than 25 times higher than it was a year ago and child immunisation rates have improved by 25 per cent.

7) Iraq’s only international port has been modernised and desilted so that it is now able to take large ships without waiting for the tide, and daily commercial aircraft departures are 100 times higher than prewar.

8) School attendance in Iraq is 10 per cent higher than a year ago.

9) Despite Saddam emptying his prisons of cutpurses and other ne’er-do-wells just before the war, coalition authorities report that crime in Basra has fallen by 70 per cent.

10) The interim Iraqi constitution is the most liberal in the Arab world. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone who looks at Iraq honestly to see it as anything other than a success story. Not perfect by any means, but a year after the war was launched the glass is at least five-eighths full, and by any objective measure Iraq is immensely improved. If you belong to Not In Our Name or Environmental Choreographers Against Genocide or Spaniards For A Quiet Life or Former Tory Cabinet Ministers United For A Saddamite Restoration, you can dispute that assessment. But in doing so you’re at odds with the Iraqi people. In the most recent national survey — by Britain’s Oxford Research International — 56 per cent of Iraqis said their lives were much or somewhat better than a year ago, while 19 per cent said they were much or somewhat worse. Seventy-one per cent of Iraqis expect their lives to be better still a year from now and only 6.6 per cent expect them to be worse.

Many Iraqis are voting with their feet. The UN High Commission for Refugees, which was expecting about two million new refugees to flee from the war last year, instead found no takers. All the traffic’s the other way, and the UN is now closing down its camps around Iraq’s borders owing to lack of business. The other day, the UN’s Ashrafi Camp in Iran, after 30 years as the largest Iraqi refugee facility, threw in the towel when the last refugee went home. Despite being advised by UNHCR that it was unsafe to do so, a million Iraqis are said to have gone back. Not bad for a country which in Saddam’s day was the fifth-largest exporter of refugees.

Much of this was predictable. Modesty (and a certain wariness during this weird ownership hiatus at the Speccie) prevents me from simply reprinting my Telegraph column from 12 April last year in this space and taking a week off in the Bahamas. But, if you’ve got one of these new-fangled computer thingies, go to the Telegraph website and fish it out. At the time, the quagmire crowd, recovering from the non-Stalingrad-like fall of Baghdad, had moved on to a glittering new array of prêt-à-porter quagmires, a veritable quagjam of imminent catastrophe. You know the routine — a ‘massive humanitarian disaster’ (predicted by the head of the World Food Programme), a ‘slide into violent anarchy’, Kurdish secession, mass uprisings by the Arab street, etc, etc. I assured Telegraph readers none of these things would occur — the Kurds would settle for being Scotland or Quebec rather than Pakistan. And, indeed, when it came to draft the interim constitution, that’s just what happened: as with French in Canada, Kurdish will be an official language of the new Iraq.