THE list of victims of the war in Iraq is growing. Our thoughts go out today to the families of the six British soldiers killed in ambushes.

These are the country's first losses since May 1 when the combat was declared over.

That combat proved something of a pushover - but winning it was the easy part. Winning the peace is proving more difficult, yet it is the most important job of all. It is clearly going to be a long and drawn out process and Britain is going to have to stick with it having come this far.

The consequences of a premature withdrawal are ghastly - only this week, Afghanistan, which the US has left on the brink of anarchy despite its liberation from the Taliban, returned to the top of the league of international heroin producers. Afghanistan's drugs will once again pollute our streets so the government we helped to install is doing neither us nor its people any favours.

If we leave Iraq on the brink of anarchy, there will be much more to worry about than drugs.

It cannot help the families of soldiers serving in Iraq, nor those 116 members of the North-East Territorial Army about to be despatched to the Gulf, that questions about the legitimacy of Britain's involvement in the war continue to be raised.

Yesterday, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw gave some pretty damning evidence to the foreign affairs select committee which is investigating the "dodgy dossier" released in February.

The dossier attempted to bounce a sceptical public into supporting the war and it was used to prove that Saddam Hussein was deceiving and misleading the United Nations' weapon inspectors.

Sadly, because of the use of a student thesis written about 11 years earlier, it is the British public that now feels deceived and misled - even though there were some other potentially justifiable reasons for going to war.

Yesterday, Mr Straw skilfully avoided culpability for the dodginess of the dossier, and also managed to exonerate his boss, Tony Blair.

But he did name Alastair Campbell as the man in charge of compiling and releasing the dossier. Mr Campbell gives evidence to the inquiry today, and he will require all his legendary spinning skills to get off the hook this time.

However, as he has wished to leave his communications post for some months now, he may well allow himself to become the latest domestic victim of the war and so prevent others being drawn into the political conflict.