The speech was notable for its focus on the economy, and its effort to turn the political capital he built up with a quick war victory into currency he can use in Congress as lawmakers shape tax legislation.
She said Mr Brown, who was then chancellor, told her: "Tony Blair is obsessed with his legacy and he thinks he can have a quick war and then a reshuffle".
"I thought this would be a quick war.
"It's going to be a quick war," I said.
"A quick war would solve all our problems," complains a frustrated butcher, referring to the Jews in his district.
All enlisted in 1916 - long after any notion of a quick war had been stripped away.
However, "preventive wars" were exactly what the hawkish Von Neumann wanted: in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, he briefly advocated the idea of a quick preventive war with the USSR to be followed by a Pax Americana.
Both it and the travel industry as a whole need the boost that will come from a quick and victorious war with Iraq.
Jack Miles's 1995 biography of God was a miracle of literary scholarship that left us with an indelible portrait of the almighty as a conflicted and flawed bildungsroman hero, an "imperfectly self-conscious" fellow with a quick temper, warring impulses and highly changeable moods.
