I am sitting in a hotel room in Washington. The television is on in the background, because I’m hoping to catch more Congressional testimony from General David Petraeus. But even the mainstream news channels seem to be losing interest. They keep cutting away to other stuff - commemoration services for 9/11, Osama’s new video. All the news channels carried Petraeus live yesterday, when he testified before the House Foreign Affairs committees. Today, he and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which should be even more interesting - since his inquisitors include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But Petraeus fatigue has set in already.

It’s been a while since I watched hours of Congresssional testimony at a stretch. Yesterday was interesting, partly because it reminded me of the massive self-importance of Congress - neither Petraeus or Crocker got to say anything for almost an hour, while the committee members droned away. Their attitude seemed to be - "I’m really glad you’ve come all the way from Iraq, because there are a few things I’d like to get off my chest."

Petraeus says that the surge is working, which infuriates the anti-war crowd. But the people at Moveon.org scored an own goal, even before the general appeared before Congress, by publishing a full-page ad in the New York Times calling him "General Betray Us". This was so over-the-top that it was a gift to the Republicans.

Mind you, sotto voce, even some senior Republicans are not totally convinced by the general.

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The symbolism of getting General David Petraeus to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the anniversary of 9/11 appealed to the White House. It should not have. It is crass. General Petraeus’s struggle to salvage the Iraq war merely underlines the fact that invading Iraq was a crazy way to respond to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Six years after 9/11, the US needs to re-think. It is now clear that Iraq was the biggest blunder of the Bush years. It is also becoming evident that counter-terrorism should no longer be the centrepiece of American foreign policy. As the official 9/11 commission demonstrated, Saddam Hussein played no role in the terrorist attacks. He also had no nuclear weapons and no significant relationship with al-Qaeda.

But the Iraq invasion was not simply the wrong response to 9/11. It has actually made the terrorism problem worse in five significant ways.

The remainder of this week’s column can be read here (FT.com subscribers only). Comments can be made below.

As well as all the numerous and dauntingly learned contributions on American empire, provoked by my post earlier this week, various people have asked me - "What have you got against Bono?"

This is a tricky question for two reasons. First, if I start explaining in too much detail, I will use all the material I am planning to save up for my column. (This is an inherent problem with this "crowdsourcing" exercise, that I’ll have to think my way around.) The second reason is even less creditable. Thinking about it, my objections to Bono are largely incoherent, and possibly indefensible.

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So Senator Fred Thompson has finally declared his bid for the presidency. I saw Thompson speak back in June and I was pretty unimpressed. Aside from the fact that his speech was made up of boilerplate conservative sloganising - with no evidence of fresh thought - Thompson had an irritating line in nudge-nudge references, designed to suggest that he is the true heir to Ronald Reagan. He is a former actor, you see, and a true conservative. Therefore he must be Reagan revived.

As Clive Crook notes in today’s FT, the resemblances are entirely superficial. Reagan - despite his insouciant exterior - was a man with very pronounced views and a long track record. He stood for something. And he wasn’t trying to imitate anybody else. Thompson by trying to position himself as Ronald Reagan the re-make, merely advertises the fact that he has nothing original to say.

Politicians quite often try to sell themselves as the reincarnation of some more illustrious (or popular) predecessor. But this almost always a bad sign.

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Thanks to everybody who contributed to the Wikipedia discussion. I was reassured by the general consensus that using Wikpiedia is not the journalistic equivalent of putting on the dunce’s hat. As for the general discussion of Web 2.0 - very useful.

For anyone wondering what happens next, let me explain how I hope to use all this stuff:

I tend to have a list of topics that I hope eventually to write newspaper articles about. The idea is that at some point something happens in the news which makes my idea seem relevant - at which point, I pounce. Alternatively, if nothing much is happening in the news, I have an excuse to delve into my bag of general themes. So I will wait for my moment with the Web 2.0 stuff. And - in the meantime - if people feel inclined to contribute further thoughts to that discussion thread, so much the better.

Among the other topics that I’ve been planning to write about for ages are American "imperialism"; democracy promotion (was it a bad idea, etc…) and my personal hatred of Bono. Over the next few weeks, I’ll start discussions on all of these themes.

But first, empire:

Generally people who talk about "American imperialism" do not mean it in a nice way. But I was struck, during the run-up to the Iraq war, by the overt flirtation with the idea of empire among certain American policymakers and intellectuals. There is Ron Suskind’s now famous quotation of an unnamed senior Bush administration official, who allegedly said: "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Charles Krauthammer in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in 2004 salivated that "this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the world - acquired it in a fit of absent-mindedness greater even than Britain’s".

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This summer two American senators have had their secret lives revealed in humiliating circumstances. Senator David Vitter of Louisiana admitted to a “very serious sin”, after his name appeared on the phone records of a Washington escort agency. Senator Larry Craig was given a 10-day suspended jail sentence after apparently cruising for gay sex in a public lavatory.

This weekend, Mr Craig resigned from the Senate. Mr Vitter, however, is hanging on. So what does it take for a sex scandal to be truly fatal? Why do some politicians survive this sort of thing and others perish?

In the Anglo-American heartland of the political sex scandal, this is not a marginal question.

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