Misfortunes never come singly, as the medieval proverb has it. No sooner had President Bush come to grips with the consequences of Hurricane Katrina than Iraq boiled over again. So in Britain the liberal press lost interest in New Orleans once Mr. Bush promised to rebuild it, and has now turned its attention gleefully to his other big headache: the “civil war” that is supposedly breaking out in Iraq.

Following the carnage wrought by suicide bombers last week, on Monday a skirmish in Basra received blanket coverage here. Two British soldiers from the SAS (special forces), operating covertly against insurgents, had been captured by rogue elements in the Iraqi police, handed over to a Shia militia, and incarcerated in the local jail. British forces, fearing that the men would be lynched, then attacked the jail in order to free them. The first attempt failed, when a crowd throwing gas bombs torched two armored vehicles, injuring several British soldiers. A second, stronger assault did recapture the two SAS men, though some 150 Iraqi prisoners also escaped.

The pictures were undeniably dramatic. A British soldier was shown on TV climbing out of his blazing vehicle, his uniform in flames, with the mob baying for his blood. The fact that no British troops were actually killed and that their mission was accomplished was ignored. The message that the British public received from most of the press coverage was that their boys had been almost burnt alive by the people they were there to help. The troops who had suffered this humiliation were the Coldstream Guards, a regiment that tourists admire outside Buckingham Palace.

The Iraqis admit what we already knew, that their security forces have been infiltrated by insurgents. That is indeed a serious problem. But a British military spokesmen yesterday described the affair as “a small incident involving 250 people in a city of 1.5 million.” Nevertheless, the damage was done.

Typical of the “troops out” brigade was the military historian Sir Max Hastings. Though he has seen action only once, as a journalist covering the Falklands War, he likes to be seen as “gung-ho,” so that his anti-war polemics are taken more seriously. I once worked for Sir Max when he was editor of the Daily Telegraph, and his journalistic diatribes against “Bush and Blair’s fatal blunders” merely echo what he used to say privately about Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Over two pages in Tuesday’s Daily Mail – a right-wing tabloid of great influence, especially on the Conservative Party – Sir Max announced portentously: “I have changed my own mind on Iraq.” He went on: “Today, George Bush and his grotesque gang of neocons are still pretending that everything is hunky-dory in Saigon – sorry, Baghdad … Whatever the Americans decide to do in Iraq, the British should start planning their withdrawal.”

The reference to Saigon is, of course, a giveaway. Sir Max, like others of his generation, is still fighting the Vietnam War. And his description of the neocons as a “grotesque gang” betrays his snobbish anti-Americanism, besides a whiff of something even fouler, for “neo-con” is an anti-Semitic code word. This is the man who last year wrote that “Israel does itself relentless harm by venting its spleen for suicide bombings on the Palestinian people.”

What is striking about such vitriolic effusions is that they emanate from both extremes of the political spectrum. The BBC changed its schedules to broadcast last week’s public debate in New York between George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens. Mr. Galloway’s old Stalinist friends and his new Islamist friends form a united front with Tory reactionaries like Sir Max Hastings.

Among the opponents of the war on terror, the most unctuous is the Church of England. A group of bishops led by the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, this week published a 100-page report advocating a “public act of repentance” toward Muslims for the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Dr. Harries, the BBC’s favorite bishop, sees American expansionism, not terrorism, as “the major threat to peace.” “What distinguishes it from many other empires in history is its strong sense of moral righteousness. In this there is both sincere conviction and dangerous illusion.” The report also sees Western democracy as “deeply flawed,” while the passage on Iran exudes such willful moral obtuseness that it deserves to be quoted in full: “The public and political rhetoric that Iran is a rogue regime, an outpost of tyranny, is as fallacious as the Iranian description of the U.S. as the Great Satan.”

What will be the reaction of Islamists such as Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to this episcopal groveling? One of their most effective propaganda tools has been to present the Americans and British as “Crusaders.” The bishops, by apologizing for a war they never supported, implicitly endorse the Islamist claim that it was indeed a crusade. The irony is that Christians are being systematically persecuted by Islamists across the Muslim world, especially in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, but the bishops pass over this unpalatable truth in silence.

Will this treason of the clerics undermine British resolve? Not as long as that devout Anglican Tony Blair remains prime minister. After a meeting with Mr. Blair last week, Rupert Murdoch revealed to Bill Clinton’s seminar at the U.N. summit that Mr. Blair had told him he had been disgusted by BBC coverage of the New Orleans disaster. “And he said it was just full of hate for America and gloating about our troubles,” Mr. Murdoch added.

I think we can deduce from this response that Mr. Blair is going to take no more notice of the bishop than of Sir Max Hastings or George Galloway. Faced with this coalition of the wild-eyed and the long-winded, Mr. Blair is not impressed. He is hardly the kind of man to desert an ally in his hour of need.