We're destined to face the wrath of The White House

Given an operational title - the Enterprise of England - the aim was to topple the heretic Queen Elizabeth, discover all weapons of mass destruction, and impose direct rule from Madrid.

Yes. Even at this early stage, I guess you can tell by the tone of this piece that I intend to draw a parallel between the Dons of the 16th Century and the Yanks of the 21st.

The reason is simple. For despite the intervening years, nothing seems to have changed when it comes to the destructiveness and power games played by Homo sapiens.

Well, we know that the whole thing back in 1588 ended in tears. Sir Francis Drake and his state-sponsored pirates harried the galleons and galleasses as far as Gravelines.

Then the fabled British weather finished the job.

Thankfully, the result was a win for us. England would go on to fulfil her imperial destiny - and you and I ended up speaking "Midlands" instead of Castillian.

Spain's attempt to subjugate this country was an ill-judged, doomed expedition.

Very much like the Iraq war, in fact.

However, my concern about this pointless waste of lives and money is not so much with regard to the tragedy of war, rather about what will happen when the British soldiers leave. Which they will, of course.

For this entire folly has been a catastrophe of our own making - and there is no one deeper at the bottom of this hole than the digger-in-chief, Tony Blair.

I've just returned from south-western Spain and thoughts of the Armada have been very much to the fore as I walked the dusty streets of Cadiz, Sanlucar and El Puerto de Santa Maria - all major bases for King Philip's great expedition.

And there was something else as well - a thought that occurred one morning as the coach left the small resort of Rota where we were staying.

It was this. What will happen to Britain when we are forced by public opinion to pull our soldiers out and this country stops throwing good money after bad?

The reason I mention this is because the Spanish have just completed their evacuation of Iraq.

This withdrawal came in the wake of the Madrid train bombings and the election of a socialist government. Capitulation or expediency, call it what you will.

I call it common sense.

Already, the US is punishing Spain for its decision. Rota relies almost exclusively on the nearby American base for work opportunities, the hotel and catering trade taking up the slack. This base was part of a deal between the US and the former fascist regime of General Franco.

Make no mistake. This installation was to have far-reaching effects in Rota...

Almost overnight, a peasant economy changed into a service industry. Then the construction of roads and holiday apartments began, aided by Washington and later swamped by bottomless purses of EU cash.

But now, the base has announced a series of redundancies among the Spanish workforce. Hundreds will be out of work and Rota will inevitably go into decline.

For these displaced people, there will be no other jobs to go to. They will be forced to migrate to big cities such as nearby Seville. Their way of life will be destroyed.

I gleaned all this from our guide, who told us about the developments at the base without a hint of malice. With remarkable stoicism he explained the situation as we drove along.

I gazed out of the window at the sun-kissed landscape, trying to put his words into some form of context. As the coach rounded a bend, I noticed a group of villagers searching the ditches for edible snails within a stone's throw of a gleaming white line of modern beach apartments.

It was indeed a collision of worlds, an ironic, if perfect metaphor.

I think it will be inevitable that America will punish us in a similar fashion when the politicians realise that an open-ended war is unfeasible and unsustainable on any number of levels.

As support for the conflict gradually declines in this country, no doubt the Government will step up the rhetoric.

Politicians will double the doses of sincerity and the hand movements will become ever-more desperate. But all the moralising in the world cannot change the fact that Iraq is a millstone that hangs heavier by the day.

And at the back of our rulers' minds there will be the certain knowledge that if we jump ship then the wrath of the White House will be felt in every corner of the land.

We have allied ourselves to George W Bush, the most unintelligent, ruthless individual to hold high office in recent times. What fools we must be.

One thing is certain. He will not allow the defection of his major ally to go unpunished.

I've always been against this war because if it has never had clear aims, no visible exit policy, neither have its supporters made the crucial distinction between the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorism.

And Government has been perfectly happy to allow that confusion to remain in people's minds.

The matter of soldiers losing their lives and taxpayers' money being squandered is the moral dimension that, try as it may, cannot be talked away by any amount of lies, bluff and bluster.

Of course, some people have longer memories than most. Arriving at Cadiz, we discover that the attack on the port by an English fleet a year before the Armada sailed still lingers on in the collective psyche of the inhabitants.

Drake - as every schoolboy once knew - singed the King of Spain's beard here in one of the most successful pre-emptive strikes in history. Eighty Spanish ships were destroyed, yet not a single Englishman lost his life.

The Armada was bloodied, but unbowed. Yet the action must have weakened the task force and spread no small degree of panic across the galleons' crowded decks.

Amazingly, such is the legacy of Drake, that to this day, the mothers of Cadiz warn their naughty children that "El Draco will get them" if they don't behave.

The fearsome reputation of the most famous Elizabethan sea captain of them all still resonates along this coast of white beaches and umbrella pines.

But there are many who now worry about the actions of another imperial power. And perhaps we in Britain should also be concerned about what lies ahead.

No doubt the indomitable Drake would have understood.