Johann Hari

John McCain is desperate to talk about the surge rather than the splurge. His Iraq war is set to cost one trillion dollars, and his deregulation-mania has cost hundreds of billions. So in order to maintain his façade of being “tough on spending”, he needs to shift the subject. That’s why he has tried to shrink the debate about the Iraq War to one small question. Not: did Saddam have Weapons of Mass Destruction? Not: did Saddam have links to 9/11? Not: why do 70 percent of Iraqis think the presence of US troops make them less safe and they should go home now?

McCain knows he will lose those arguments, so he wants us to talk solely about whether the surge of US troops last year has been successful. But a hole was just blown in that argument – and blood is rushing through.

Those of us who got Iraq wrong have a particular duty to honestly describe what is happening now. A major study by the distinguished scientific journal ‘Environment and Planning A’ this week has revealed the real picture. The Republican nominee claims the US troops have stopped the violence by their physical presence. To test this, Professor John Agnew and his colleagues used the same techniques the US government has adopted to monitor ethnic cleansing in Burma and Uganda.

Here’s how it works. When an entire ethnic or religious group is driven out, they abandon their houses – and they aren’t there to switch on the lights. Their areas become much more dark. If satellite images show night-light remains the same in the areas dominated by one ethnic group but significantly falls in mixed areas, you know ethnic cleansing is happening.

So what happened in Iraq? Before, during and after the surge, the areas that had always been Sunni and the areas that had always been Shia were brighter than ever. But in the vast mixed areas, half or more of the lights went out in the six months leading up to the surge. They then stabilised in half-darkness. By the time the US troops arrived, there were no more mixed areas left. The easy pickings – the Shia who lived next door, or the Sunni who lived up the road – had all been attacked already. Sunni and Shia weren’t killing each other any more because they had retreated into vast enclaves, cleansed and armed, surrounded by barriers manned by militias. Four million people had been driven from their homes.

Professor Agnew explains: “Our findings suggest the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for the process of ethno-sectarian neighbourhood homogenization that is now largely achieved.” The new US troops have simply built concrete walls between the newly-cleansed areas.

This study is a bleak vindication of my extraordinary colleague Patrick Cockburn, who has been almost alone in telling the human story of the cleansing. Here is one example. In May 2006, four gunmen turned up at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in north-east of Baghdad. “Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you,” they said. She was a Shia in a Sunni neighbourhood, so she had to run, or die. “Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house,” Leila said. “I came away with nothing.” Now imagine millions of Leilas, and you have much of Iraq today.

Those who try to get past the checkpoints and walls to their old neighbourhoods find that the intercommunal hatred has not been soothed. Cockburn gives one typical example: “When one couple, both Shia, went last month to visit the house from which they had fled in the Sunni al-Makanik district of Dora in south Baghdad, they were immediately shot dead and their driver beheaded.”

Yet Obama has failed to properly challenge this propaganda-surge about the surge. Instead, he echoes the McCain line that “the surge has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams”, and swiftly shifts the conversation back to the terrible decision to invade in the first place. He has evidently concluded that this case is too complex and too easily attacked with the ludicrous charge that he is “criticising the troops.” So John McCain is getting away with braying about the “great success” of wrapping one of the worst programmes of ethnic cleansing of our time in towering concrete walls of reinforcement.

As it bleeds into its fifth year, the Iraq war is excelling only in savagery and surrealism. We now have an American President publicly citing the similarities to Vietnam as a reason why the US must not withdraw – and he is merrily quoting Graham Greene’s anti-war masterpiece ‘The Quiet American’ in his defence. Far from thinking anything has gone wrong, he declares: “I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a great debt of gratitude. That’s the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”

Meanwhile, the Iraqi psyche is so wrecked by the 7/7 blasting onto their streets 24/7 that my Iraqi friends report mass hysteria gnawing into the survivors. After a small string of attacks by badgers – you know, the little furry creatures - in Basra, so many people were convinced this was a new weapon of war that UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer had to announce publicly: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.”

The last excuse the remaining defenders of the war can scrape together is – yes, but it’ll be even worse if we leave. As David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, recently said: “If you don’t like Darfur, you’re going to hate Baghdad [after a US withdrawal].”

Buried in all the incoherent self-serving propaganda pumped out, there is a serious dilemma for people genuinely worried about the Iraqi people. What if a genocide begins to unfold in Iraq after the withdrawal of international troops? There are harbingers of it already. The jihadi suicide-massacres of the Yezhidis – a harmless, tiny religious sect - in Northern Iraq last week is only one signal. The Iraqi writer Nir Rosen warns: “There are no non-sectarian Iraqis left, no non-sectarian militia, and no physical space for those rejecting sectarianism. Even secular Sunnis and Shia are embracing sectarian militias because nobody else will protect them.”

I have been startled by how viciously even my democratic, liberal Iraqi friends now talk about The Other Side in sweeping, annihilatory language. Almost every institution of the Iraqi state – the police, army, even the hospitals – are now bisected into Shia and Sunni wings who detest each other. What we are seeing in Iraq today is, in slower motion, what happened in India and Pakistan sixty years ago: the hellish ethnic cleansing of mixed areas, until everyone is trapped in homogenous blocks. There is a real and hefty risk that this will metastasize into an attempt to physically eliminate one of the groups. There is also a risk of the neighbouring countries invading, turning it into a Congo-on-the-Tigris, with the Saudis marching into defend the Sunnis, the Iranians invading to protect the Shia, and the Turks invading to prevent the creation of a mini-Kurdistan in the North.

But is this a case for keeping the US forces there? A recent, much-discussed-in-DC article in the New York Times by Brookings Institute scholars Michael O’Hanlan and Kenneth Pollack said so. They argued that ‘the surge’ of 21,000 troops into Iraq is finally working, and creating momentum away from sectarian violence.

If this was true, it would be important - but their own Institute’s figures show it is the opposite of the truth. It makes no sense to compare statistics on violence in Iraq month-to-month, because the violence fluctuates seasonally (as it does in most cities in the world). For reliable figures, you have to compare this July to last July. And what do you find in Brookings’ statistics? Iraqi military and police killed are up 23 percent. The number of people killed in multiple fatality bombings is up 19 percent. US troop fatalities are up 80 percent. The size of the insurgency is up 250 percent. Attacks on oil and gas pipelines are up 75 percent. The refugee outflow has doubled. Hours of electricity available per day are down 14 percent. Far from creating the space for political compromise among Iraqis, the Sunnis and secularists have marched angrily out of the Maliki government. This is success? This is momentum?

The US troops cannot be an agent of anything positive in Iraq, after using chemical weapons in civilian cities, after using torture routinely, after overseeing the death of 650,000 Iraqis. Today, 78 percent of Iraqis say the US presence “is doing more harm than good” and should leave. This is hardly surprising: the former US soldier in Iraq Jeff Englehart said recently: “The general attitude was, a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.” The current US strategy – of building up a ‘national’ army and police force that consists essentially of violent Shia militias – may actually be unwittingly preparing the forces for a genocide.

Nor can the US keep demanding Iraqi politicians “sort it out” and build an army capable of taking over the country at once. It took a decade to build something resembling a national army in Bosnia, and that was after a comprehensive peace agreement. The US is demanding the Iraqi politicians build one in just a few years, in the middle of a civil war, and put it to work on behalf of an unpopular occupying power. It is an impossible task.

So how do they get out without leaving behind something even more hellish? This question isn’t just a propaganda ploy by the Bushies to justify staying longer (though it is certainly that too); it is a genuine moral problem.

To grope for a solution, we must first need to be honest and clear about the Bush administration’s motives. They are currently trying to force the Iraqi parliament, as its top priority, to pass an oil law that would hand two-thirds of Iraq’s oil fields to their friends and paymasters in Big Oil. This fits with what they have been saying is their real motive in Iraq for decades. In 1977, Paul Wolfowitz wrote: "We... have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf Region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israel conflict." In 1990, Dick Cheney - then Defence Secretary - said of Iraq and Kuwait: "We're there because the fact of the matter is, that part of the world controls the world supply of oil."

The claim that the likes of Shell and Haliburton have to be brought in because only they have the know-how to excavate this oil is simply untrue. In 1972, Iraqi oil shifted from the control of the same foreign corporations to the Iraqi state. Output didn’t fall, as Big Oil menacingly warned. It trebled. Ordinary Iraqis see this plan as looting of their wealth, with 63 percent appalled in a local poll. Yet the US is suppressing resistance: they leaned on the Ministry of the Interior to use old Saddam-era laws to ban the oil worker’s trade unions who have been democratically, peacefully fighting the law. It demonstrates what former Republican Senator Mike DeWine said recently: “We’re not in Iraq primarily for the Iraqis, we’re in Iraq for us.”

Only massive public pressure will change this Bush course. So what should we demand they do? An immediate withdrawal with no replacement forces could indeed leave a genocidal vacuum. That’s why former Senator George McGovern, who heroically fought against the Vietnam War, has worked out a detailed way out of Iraq that doesn’t leave behind a holocaust. It is mapped out in his book ‘Out of Iraq’ – and it begins with a simple apology from the US, Britain and other invaders for the catastrophe we have wrought – the opposite of Bush’s deranged demands for thanks. There must then be a commitment to dismantle all permanent US bases on Iraqi soil, and to allow the ownership of Iraqi oil by all Iraqi citizens – with the royalties divided equally between every Iraqi and paid out as a regular cheque, like they do in Alaska.

The US then needs to convene a regional conference, at which they pledge to pay full-whack for an international stabilization force to police Iraq, manned exclusively by Muslim countries like Morrocco, Tuinisia, Egypt, and Jordan. These countries will need all sorts of financial inducements to send troops. Tough. Pay them. McGovern calculates that even at top-rate, this would cost $5.5bn – just 3 percent of keeping the US forces there for the next two years. Once the police are fellow-Muslims, the often-murderous insurgents will be much more isolated. Al Qaeda’s tiny presence (estimated by US generals to be fewer than 500 fighters) will be even more despised. Only troops like this could have the legitimacy needed to stop a genocide.

It’s not a perfect plan. People will still die – losing the only life they have – in the fallout. But it is better than any other option I can see. In Baghdad today, people have stopped eating fish from the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The reason? So many dead bodies are being dumped there every day – and being munched by the fish – that Iraqis began to fear they would contract the diseases associated with cannibalism. We have reduced Iraqis to consuming themselves. Now what was the President saying about gratitude again?

POSTSCRIPT: Bush’s argument-by-analogy that the US was wrong to leave Vietnam because of the ensuing holocaust perpetrated by Pol Pot next door in Cambodia is so historically illiterate it’s hard to know how to answer it. I was ruminating on it and thought I'd add some other points.

By the time the war ended in 1975, the US invasion had caused the deaths of 3.3 million Vietnamese people, according to Robert McNamara, who was US Secretary of Defence for much of the slaughter. The Vietnamese countryside was collapsing under the weight of the chemicals and explosives dropped on it. The only way ‘forward’ – as Richard Nixon’s old henchman G. Gordon Liddy told me in an interview – was to “bomb the Red River dykes. It would have drowned half the country and starved the other half. There would have been no way the Viet Cong could have operated if we had the will-power to do that.” This would have been even worse than the communist tyranny that eventually consumed Vietnam.

As for the catastrophe in Cambodia, there is near-consensus among historians that the psychopathic Khmer Rouge was a tiny, irrelevant fringe in Cambodia – until the US started fire-bombing the country as an extension of the Vietnam war. Only then did the terrorized Cambodian people became more receptive to extreme solutions. US actions in Vietnam didn’t prevent the Khmer Rouge; it enabled their rise. After 1979, the Us – including Bush’s father – supported the Khmer Rouge with arms and slatherings of cash too.

You can read my article about why I think I was wrong to support the Iraq war here, my wider analysis of the pro-war left position here, my article about the mercenary armies unleashed on the country here, and my article about the disastrous economics of the occupation here.

You can support the Iraqi trade unions - the most brave and secular democratic force in the country, currently being savaged by both the jihadi fanatics and the US occupation - at this site: Please give what you can.

Iraq is rapdily vanishing into the mists of uncollectable, unknowable news, with information about the collapsing country now only travelling as far as an Iraqi scream can be heard. But sometimes, if you peer closely, you can glimpse reality.

Last week, Shia militiamen seized four "security contractors" working for the Candian company Gardaworld. Buried in the story of this small horror is the bigger tale of a vast shift in how Western wars are going to be fought in the twenty-first century if the American right has their way - and one of the great lost scandals of this war.

These men are not "security contractors", nor are they "civilian operatives", nor "reconstruction workers." They are mercenaries. There are now more of them in Iraq than there are professional soldiers: Britain alone has 21,000 in the country, raking in $1.6bn a year.

As he scurried out the door in 2004, Paul Bremer - the first US Viceroy to Iraq - issued Order 17, which exempted all mercenaries operating in the country from having to obey the law. He in effect gave these men a license to kill - and they are using it, every day.

Yas Ali Mohammed Yassiri was a peaceful 19 year-old Iraqi trying to get on with an ordinary teenage life in a deeply unordinary Baghdad when he boarded a taxi on his street in the Masbah neighbourhood. The mercenaries guarding the US Embassy Spokesman in Baghdad drove around the corner, so Ali's taxi slowed down - but the convoy opened fire anyway to clear their path. Ali was hit in the throat and died immediately.

Although the US embassy now admits the convoy "opened fire prematurely", the mercenaries were merely sent home; they are free, happy men.

This is not a one-off freak. It is virtually an everyday occurrence. Colonel Thomas Hammed, who was placed in charge of rebuilding the Iraqi military by Bush, explains, "They [the mercenaries] made enemies everywhere. I would ride around with Iraqis in beat up Iraqi trucks, they were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated."

In April 2004, mercenaries working for a private militia named Blackwater were guarding US occupation headquarters in Najaf when a protest by Shia Iraqi civilians began to stir outside. According to the Washington Post and eye-witnesses, Blackwater opened fire on the protestors, unleashing so many rounds so rapidly they had to pause every fifteen minutes to allow their gun barrels to cool down. A video of this attack made it onto the web, where a mercenary describes the Iraqis they are gunning down as "fuckin' niggers".

The distinguished reporter Jeremy Scahill claims in his new book 'Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army', that mercenary troops in Iraq are even using "experimental ammunition" that US forces are forbidden from firing. These bullets, made of "blended metal", are designed to shatter on impact, creating "untreatable wounds." As one mercenary recently bragged about the ammo's impact when he shot an Iraqi with it: "It entered his butt and completely destroyed everything in the lower-left section of his stomach... everything was torn apart."

Last year, Representative Dennis Kucinich repeatedly asked Pentagon officials at a Senate hearing if the US Department of Defence would prosecute a private contractor who blatantly murdered Iraqi civilians. After being told repeatedly "Sir, I can't answer that question," Kucinich said, "Wow. Think about what that means. These private contractors can get away with murder... They aren't subject to any laws at all."

How did this happen? How did Iraq become flooded with private militia making a killing?

This story begins back in the early 1990s, when Dick Cheney was Secretary of State for Defence. He believed that the Pentagon "bureaucracy" was mere Big Government and had to be smashed into a thousand corporate pieces to be made "efficient". Cheney's proposals continued at a slow pace during the Clinton Presidency, who brought mercenaries into the Balkans - and then went into over-drive when he was back as Vice President.

The US right has a slew of reasons to privatize the US military so rapidly. The most obvious is simple corruption. It funnels money to companies in which they have a huge stake, and who in turn donate a fortune to the Republican Party.

But this is a secondary motive. The main limit on an aggressive US foreign policy today is the limited number of US citizens who are prepared to sign up to kill and die for it. Mercenaries solve the problem: just buy troops in. The public is far less likely to protest against a war if the victims are hardened Colombians in it for the cash, rather than their cousin from Wisconsin who signed up out of patriotism.

In mercenary wars, all citizens are asked to give is money, not blood. The Cheney model of mercenary warfare being tried out in Iraq is, in fact, a way of making possible his vision of a twenty-first century where wars for resources will be "necessary" on a "regular basis".

We have been here before. In his Discourses, Niccolai Machiavelli describes how, in its dying days, the Roman Empire was no longer able to inspire a large citizen-militia, and increasingly bought armies of willing foreigners. The result was decadence - and imperial collapse.

What would the world look like if Cheney's vision of privatised armies prevailed in this century? There would be far more wars, far less checked by the rules of war which were built up after the nightmare of the 1940s: in other words, more Iraqs.

But history also points towards a longer-term danger. Where governments depend on private armies, they become increasingly their servants, physically incapable of standing up to them. In the 14th century, corporations determined the fate of the Hundred Years War, and in lulls in teh fighting, they would burn down towns that refused to pay for their protection. The French sovereign was powerless to stop them, because his own forces were too feeble.

Only a little more than a century ago, the East India Company ignored the explicit orders of the British government and attacked Portuguese garrisons in India - solely to boost its own profit margins. The Empire relied on private militias, until they slipped off the leash. Phillip Bobbit, a former advisor to presidents Nixon and Reagan, warns in his book 'The Shield of Achilles' that as we dissolve back into private armies, we are setting ourselves up for a repeat of this corporate dominance over government.

Dick Cheney effectively believes in rule by corporations, rather than rule by the state - so for him, this is a comforting vision. For the rest of us, the seizure of British mercenaries in Baghdad provides us with a glimpse of a future where we are stumbling onto a corporate-battlefield with no end. The Iraqis are living - and dying - in this dystopia today.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

As the crowd clapped along to the old back-to-the-nineties tune of 'Things Can Only Get Better' in Trimdon Labour Club, awaiting Tony Blair's swansong, there was a bleaker postscript to the Blair years piling up half a world away.

In Baghdad morgue, these days they separate out the hundreds of Shia bodies and Sunni bodies that are dumped on them every day. It's easy to do: the Shia have been beheaded, while the Sunnis have been tortured to death with power-drills.

I phoned an Iraqi friend in Baghdad whose family was murdered by Saddam. Like me, she supported the war because she thought anything - even an Anglo-American invasion headed by Bush - would be better than Saddam and his sons slaughtering onto the far horizon.

"Oh, is Blair going?" she said acidly. "You know, I'm more worried about the three bodies at the bottom of my street that have been there for a week now. I'm more worried about how I'm going to get through the next day without being killed. I'm really not thinking about Tony Blair. Not ever again."

How did Blair's story end here, with 650,000 dead Iraqis, according to a medical report described by Blair's own scientific advisors as "close to best practice"? As somebody who made an equally foolish misjudgement on Iraq, albeit for very different reasons, I think I have some insight on how Blair's thinking went so wrong.

Tony Blair came to office with very few views about foreign policy. In his Trimdon farewell sonata, he admitted he "came to political maturity at the end of the Cold War." The Cold War defrosted just three years before he became Labour leader.

So his formative foreign policy experience - the place where his whole mindset was smelted - was Kosovo. Like everyone who followed the news, he had been aware throughout the 1990s that the Milosevician forces of Serbian nationalism had been ravaging the Balkans, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians. The world had offered nothing but a passive shrug. In 1997, with fears that the violence would begin again, Blair had a naive, noble desire to stop Serbian ultra-nationalism in its bloody tracks.

So he did something messy. He coaxed Bill Clinton into acting and started a bombing campaign with an unclear mission, no mandate from the UN until after it had begun, and no plain end in sight. The only core to this action was Blair's belief that Something Must Be Done.

And it sort-of worked. The Albanian refugees got to go home, Milosevic was toppled just months later, and Blair was welcomed on the streets of Kosovo as a liberator-hero. There are messy after-details we rarely discuss: the more than 100,000 Serbs who have been ethnically cleansed have not gone home. But the Balkans are still a somewhat-better place than if Milsoevic had continued unhindered and unhinged.

From this example, Blair inferred a string of general principles, where he proposed to use the military might of the British state to stem the oppressions of tyrants. He got an opportunity to flex this belief-system again in 2000, when he ordered British troops to stop a gang of hand-chopping thugs from seizing power in Sierra Leone. Babies there are still named Tony Blair in thanks.

When it became clear the Bush administration was priming for a show-down with Saddam Hussein, Blair thought his Kosovo approach would work again. Don't worry too much about legality or the UN - it will end with cheers on the streets of Baghdad. The WMD lies were slathered on top, another motive to do The Right Thing.

Where was the flaw? It was in his analysis of American power. In a terrible misjudgement, he projected his own broadly good motives onto an American state with very different purposes, tied to geopolitics and corporate influence. As Dick Cheney said at the time of the first Gulf War, "We're there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil."

But Blair knew suprisingly little about American power and its purposes. In a conversation with John Snow, he revealed he had never heard of Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratic leader of Iran who was toppled by the CIA in 1953 because he wanted to control his own country's oil supplies. As recently as 2005, he had never even heard of the Project for a New American Century.

One friend of Blair's recently told me she was shocked in 1997 when she saw Blair welcoming Henry Kissinger into Downing Street and lauding him as a great statesman and friend of democracy. She challenged him over it, but discovered "he just doesn't know about this history - how the Americans toppled democratic governments in Latin America and the Middle East. He really didn't know anything about it. It was shocking."

Here is where Blair's beliefs about foreign policy intersect with the ideas he formed in domestic politics. Tony Blair's core belief is that politics is all about being at the heart of power. In the 1980s, he fought against the Bennite infestation of the Labour Party, and was appalled by followers of a man who proclaimed cheerfully that the 1983 catastrophe was "a great victory for socialism" because so many people voted for a "pure" socialist manifesto.

Confronted with people who preferred this impotent moral purity, Blair was determined to be the opposite. As he once put it, "opposition is a waste of time." Wherever there is power, use it. Never back away.

So when he came close to US state power, every instinct he had formed in his political life told him to cut away any doubts and embrace the power. To retreat and offer a criticism - as he would see it, an impotent criticism - was contrary to everything he had learned.

But to hold together his twin beliefs in his own humanitarianism and in cleaving to power, Blair had to learn a selective blindness towards the American state. This ability had always been there, enabling him to support deadly sanctions on Iraq or arms deals to foul regimes, but now it became swollen.

He offered weasel words of denial about the US policies of using water-boarding and chemical weapons in Iraq, and would only condemn Guantanamo as "an anomaly". He refused to see how his Coalition of the Willing was really a Coalition of the Drilling, saying it was a "conspiracy theory" to talk about Iraq's oil. His early humanitarianism bled into an unthinking pro-Americanism, and he lost the ability to tell the difference.

And as Iraq descended, he clung to increasingly desperate soundbites to gloss over the tension. He declared that the disasters in Iraq were the work of al Qaeda and the Iranian regime, rather than a largely indigenous string of Shia and Sunni insurgencies descending into civil war after Bush-era brutalisation.

And still the drilled and hacked bodies pile up in Baghdad morgue, even more - incredibly - than under the psychotic Saddam. The stench of these corpses will choke any discussion of Tony Blair's legacy long into the historical night.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk or to me at johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read the article in which I explain where my own thinking (as opposed to Blair's) went wrong on Iraq in English here ou en francais ici.

It is, on this subject, my first sliver of doubt. Seeing a rope placed around Saddam Hussein’s neck – and hearing the ecstasy of my friends in Baghdad, saying this is a sweet, lingering moment of justice – has forced me, for the first time in my life, to wonder if I really do oppose the death penalty at all times and in all places.

This is a strange jolt. For me, opposition to hanging has always been manifestly moral. Should the state take a defenceless, unarmed prisoner and break their neck? Obviously not. It is a sign of civilisation that you treat even the most depraved and despicable people with decency. And yet – I have to admit it – when I saw Saddam’s snapped corpse, I was pleased. I spent some time in ‘his’ Iraq. I saw the raw terror at the mention of his name. I saw the Marsh Arabs, rotting in rusting desert huts after Saddam poisoned their marshes and slaughtered their families for the “crime” of calling for democracy. So when my friend Ahmed – whose father was murdered by Saddam’s goons – said in a 4am phone call that he felt his dad was finally at rest now, the anti-death penalty arguments died on my tongue.

So should there be an exception for tyrants, the Mussolinis and Caecescus? This question forced me to go back to first principles. I do not believe in killing people to meet some abstract, quasi-religious standard of ‘justice’, where a death must be avenged with a death. No: the only justification for using violence, ever, is a utilitarian one – to prevent even more violence occurring. To choose the least controversial example, innocent people died horrifically in the bombing of Nazi Berlin – but even more people would have died if the bombing had not gone ahead, so it was not only justified but morally necessary.

(I thought, along with a majority of Iraqis, that the invasion of Iraq was justified by a similar utilitarian calculus. We were wrong: over 650,000 have now died, compared to 210,000 if Saddam had continued murdering at the same pace. I should have known better – plenty of others did.)

Of course, the defenders of hanging, the gas chamber and the electric chair as tools of everyday democratic government use precisely this utililitarian argument. They say that killing murderers deters other people from following their path. But the evidence shows they are wrong: Oklahoma state, for example, has had consistent murder rates before, during and after a recent 25-year moratorium on capital punishment.

It doesn’t deter dictators either. Is Kim Jong-Il or King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia going to torture one less person today? Of course not. Yet when dispensing with ex-dictators, there is an additional consideration. Executing them ends the perpetual fear among the population of a restoration. While it is nonsense to say this will break the back of the Baathist wing of the insurgency, nobody in Iraq today fears – as they truly, madly, deeply did two days ago – that there will come a time when Saddam is back and they will be made to pay for supporting his opponents. (Of course they have plenty more to be terrified of: over 1000 people are dying every week in Baghdad alone).

But is this enough? Does the relief and joy given to a once-tyrannised population outweigh the murder of a human being? No. In the end, I cannot find a morally justifiable explanation for my glee at Saddam’s death. The real test of your belief in human rights is not whether you support them for the innocent – the Marsh Arabs and the Ang Sang Su Kyis. No: it is whether you support them for the disgusting, the depraved, the genocidal – the Saddams. Today, Iraqis have achieved one sort of victory over their tyrant. But the greater victory would have been to say – you hanged; you tortured; you butchered; but we will not do that. We are better than you.

But how do I suggest that to Ahmed, who is enjoying his first happy day in a year? Indeed, how can we lecture Iraqis on anything, when – in infinitely easier circumstances – we have failed to deal at all with our own Iraqi-killing criminals? To give just one example: in November 2004, the US forces, with logistical support from the UK, surrounded Fallujah – a civilian city the size of Leicester – and forbade any males between the age of 18 and 60 from leaving. They then released a chemical weapon on the city’s residents – white phosphorous, a cousin of napalm – that burns flesh right down to the bone. There is no utilitarian justification for this; it is a vicious war crime. Somebody – Donald Rumsfeld? George W. Bush? – ordered it, just as they have ordered the epidemic use of torture and secret prisons across Iraq.

Once they have been punished, I will feel able to tell my terrified, terrorised Iraqi friends that this weekend they failed to defend human rights as they should.

I haven’t written about Iraq recently, because I think those of us who supported this catastrophic invasion should apologise and then have the humility to shut up and reflect on what we have wrought.

According to Amnesty International, torture is as rife today as under the Ba’athist thugocracy. The Bush administration has used chemical weapons in the heart of a civilian city, Fallujah – after banning all men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving lest they were “enemies of the Iraqi people”. Women are being forced to quit their jobs and cover their faces. Iraq is rapidly depopulating as millions flee. And there are now plausible studies suggesting more than 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. That means for every one person who died here on 7/7, more than 10,000 people have died in Iraq.

The Iraqis I speak to every few days are in various stages of denial, despair and terror, lacking the language to describe what is happening to their country. As John Stewart asked on the Daily Show, “What do you call it when a hellhole hits a cataclysm?”

But it is worth breaking this silence to make a few points. There are ever-louder whispers from Washington that the Bush administration is considering junking the (very) limited democracy Iraq now has, sacking the Prime Minister, and installing a junta of “national unity” generals to “impose order”. These rumours are so advanced that last week, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki felt obliged to publicly ask George Bush for reassurances they were not true. Indeed, the imposition of stringent targets on Maliki from Washington this week – as though Iraq were an NHS trust in Bangor – rests on this potential coup d’etat as a threat: if Maliki fails to meet the targets, what will happen?

This Iraq-needs-a-dictator approach is based on a false analysis of what has gone wrong since the war, one that is strangely shared by some parts of the anti-war movement. As Bush’s team moots installing a strong-man, Piers Morgan, whose Daily Mirror was one of the most prominent voices against the war, recently said if he was still in charge of the paper he would be leading one last Iraq campaign: “Bring back Saddam.” Their argument is that Iraq is an irredeemably tribal society, always on the brink of fracturing into a Shia-vs-Sunni-vs-Kurd conflagration. This ethnic chaos needs an iron fist to keep it in order – an Arab Tito. Even a sliver of democracy is the problem. Dictatorship is the solution.

But to suggest that the emergence of a violent tribalism in Iraq was the inevitable after-effect of ending Saddamism is to actually let the Bush administration off the hook. It took more than two years – and a huge amount of violence directed by unrepresentative militias, against Shia and Sunni mosques, marketplaces and shrines – for Iraqis to turn on each other in significant numbers. Even now, a large majority of all three Iraqi communities – according to every poll – still believe in a unified Iraq under an elected government.

Tribalism has taken this toxic form because of the total economic collapse of Iraq overseen by Bush. His administration immediately and undemocratically imposed on Iraq the opposite of a Marshall Plan, a deflationary Republican wet dream: privatize everything immediately, impose a flat tax, slash the public sector to pieces. Everywhere this has been tried, from Argentina to Russia, it has led to total economic collapse. Create a situation where unemployment hits 70 percent in any country and people will look to tribes they barely think about in better times. If only a third of Brits had jobs and bombs were going off everywhere, we would fracture into warring white, Asian and black tribes too. Would we start saying Britain was an irredeemably tribal society that could only be ruled by a dictator?

So the emerging Bushite narrative about Iraq – hey folks, we nobly tried democracy but it turns out they’re just too damn tribal and they need a tough guy after all – is wrong and repellent. For people like Piers Morgan who have been vindicated on the war to fall for this now is an Act Three tragedy.

Indeed, the Bush administration has been deliberately scuppering attempts to end tribal warfare. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Maliki carefully crafted a 28-point national reconciliation package modelled on post-Apartheid South Africa. Militias would be pardoned, their colleagues released from jail, and their arms handed in. All the major groups expressed interest – but the Bush administration smothered it at birth by refusing to agree to the basic demand of most militias, a timetable for withdrawal of foreign troops.

This withdrawal is now inevitable, and soon. The only question is whether our governments leave very quickly of their own choice, or are chased out of the Green Zone like the last helicopters from Saigon. The shape of one possible Bush withdrawal strategy is now becoming clear, and it’s not hard to smell the suplhorous influence of Henry Kissinger – who has been outed by Bob Woodward as Bush’s new mentor – on it. Install a friendly CIA-backed dictator who will iron out Iraq’s creases (no need to ask about the messy tactics, boys) and ensure the oil keeps flowing.

This access to oil supplies was always the primary goal of the Bush team. As long ago as 1991 – back when the only thing George W. Bush tortured was the English language – Dick Cheney said about Iraq, “We’re there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil.” Wolfowitzian talk of spreading democracy was a sugar-coating, easily burned away.

In opposition to this strategy-of-sorts, many people propose to leave immediately. I have some sympathy for this, but it has a big flaw: the departure would be seen as a victory for the mainly sectarian and fundamentalist resistance groups. It would increase their power and prestige in Iraq’s post-war vacuum.

I think there is a better way to achieve a very swift exit. It is for the occupying forces to hold a referendum, within one month, asking the Iraqi people – do you want the foreign troops to remain for another year, or should they leave now? The answer Iraqis will give is pretty obvious: in the latest poll, 82 percent opted for immediate withdrawal. But if the Iraqi people have a chance to give the purple finger to the occupiers as bravely as they did to the suicide-murderers last year, then the Anglo-American exit will become a victory for them and for the ballot box, not for jihadism. It will maximise their (horribly slim) chances of slowly patching together a more decent country from the militia-splinters into which it has fragmented.

Arguing for this quick democratic exit against the Kissingerian proposals of George Bush might be the last thing we can do for the Iraqi people, along with finally holding our leaders accountable for the crimes – the chemical weapons, the torture – they have committed in the course of this catastrophe.

The Edinburgh Festival is a sprawling, trawling Rorschach Test that ends up having all the obsessions of our culture projected onto it sooner or later. Throughout the 1990s, the festival – like the country – contracted in its focus even as it swelled in audience numbers, looking almost exclusively to the living room and the bedroom as the place where Life happens. The symbol of this depoliticised dick-joke fringe was ‘Puppetry of the Penis’, where Aussies would make extraordinary shapes with their penises, testicles and scrotums. (They really could do the Sydney Opera House).

But the dominance of this funny, faintly pointless entertainment fell with the World Trade Centre. Today the Fringe – like our consciousness – sprawls from the slums of Soweto to the peasant-farmers of Colombia to the fresh mass graves of Iraq. Sure, penises are still being stretched and contorted and subject to a thousand jokes – but now they are next to a foaming pool of stage-blood and unstaged-rage.

This year’s international smorgasbord is dominated by one particular sticky food-stuff – the Middle East. At times this year Edinburgh seems like Baghdad-in-a-kilt, with over a dozen Mesopotamian stories to choose from. Since it has never been more important to hear Iraqi voices, I randomly plucked a twin-set of plays that show the invasion of Iraq from both ends – the occupied, and the occupier.

‘Baghdad Burning’ at the Pleasance is a bleak staging of ‘Riverbend’, the famous blog tapped out in real-time by a 24 year old Iraqi girl as she watched Iraq fracture, fissure and fundamentalize around her. The director Kimberley Kefgen has made the smart decision to have the blogger represented by not one voice but by four women who shift between voices and roles. This is how blogs feel – not like the steady monologue of a one-woman show, but like a cacophony of echoing, sparring voices.

Before the war, M. – the pseudonymous author – was a computer engineer who drove to work alone, worked in mixed company and hung out with Sunni, Shia, Christian and Kurd. The play traces the dissolution of this world, as it slowly becomes impossible to leave her house without a male relative – “I miss the streets”, she says – or without a hijab. “Young women have the choice of giving in, or constantly being defiant,” she says, and her brave refusals erode as they bring greater and greater risk to her and her family. From her perspective, the people who have been liberated are the mullahs, now empowered to issue and enforce ridiculous dictates like a fatwa against the World Cup on the grounds it “distracts people from worship and prayer.”

The most powerful details here are the smallest. “It’s maddening to walk up to the faucet, turn the tap, feel the pipes groaning, and nothing comes,” she says. At one point, the stage lights crack to black, and, without comment, the actresses take out torches and carry on with their scene. If anybody returns home late, it is a cue to panic. Have they been seized by the jihadists? The Americans? Kidnappers-for-cash? M. realises she is slowly becoming addicted to valium, her only path to sleep amidst the explosions, but says, “It’s like finding out you have cancer while you’re fighting off a hungry alligator. You worry about the cancer later.” Anyone who has spent time in Iraq will recognise the warm personal details too, like the endless discussion of tea, and the raw horror that this nation of tea connoisseurs exhibit at the terrible thought of a tea-bag. But it’s the hellish details that linger. It’s not wise to eat river fish any more, M. is told, because they are feeding on the human remains dumped there in near-industrial quantities.

This is a story of despair, and it is hard for somebody who supported the invasion to watch it without a feeling of nauseous shame. Towards the end, M. declares, “We given up on democracy, security, even electricity. Just bring back the water.” But this line hints at the play’s central flaw – I think of it as the fallacy of Michael Moore’s kite. In its attempt to mount a clean, clear and necessary critique of the horrors of the occupation, the play irons out any ambiguities. M. might tell us she has lost hope in democracy, but the audience is never shown those initial hopes. The play skips over the elections – where a majority of Iraqis risked their lives to vote – in a single line.

Saddam Hussein is only mentioned once, when M. blandly says in passing, “Whether you loved Saddam or hated him…” – as if these two groups were equally divided among the Iraqi people. Like Moore, she presents Iraq before the war as if it was Sweden, a happy kite-flying land where Kurd and Sunni walked hand-in-hand through the unpoisoned-marshlands. She even laments “the lost sovereignty,” as if the Iraq people – rather than a fascist dictator they loathed – had been sovereign over Iraq. Why give the defenders of George Bush’s occupation such an easy excuse to ignore the essential criticisms contained in this play?

There are many Iraqi blogs that have been terribly ambiguous journeys, where Iraqis find and lose hope on an almost daily basis, alternately giving the purple finger to the jihadists and then reeling from America’s chemical weapons and ‘structural adjustment’. To dramatise this volatile agony would have been more representative of the Iraqi people and more theatrically powerful than ‘Baghdad Burning’, a play that is simply a straight line into the abyss. But that would require the adaptor-director Kefgen to give a different answer to the question – is this a work of art, with the subtleties and shades of bloody-grey that requires, or a piece of political polemic? M’s potted lectures to a (clearly American) audience about the danger of reintroducing the draft or electing Kerry seemed like an inauthentic distraction from her personal story. By presenting M. as certain from the beginning that the fall of Saddam could only ever be a disaster, Kefgen makes her polemic sharper – but her art more blunt and stunted.

Gregory Burke’s play ‘Black Watch’ is the story of the war from the other side of the gun-barrel. The Black Watch has been Scotland’s crack regiment for over 300 years, but today – as it shoots through Iraq – it is finally facing death as an independent force, merged into a modernised army. One soldier says, “Fuckin’ shite war to end wi’, eh?” but unlike ‘Baghdad Burning’ this is a cruelly subtle work.

As it opens, a researcher enters a Glasgow pub to talk to some soldiers about their experiences in Iraq, and for a terrible moment it seems like ‘Black Watch’ will be yet another turgid work of docu-theatre passively recounting their stories. But instead it takes their words and machine-guns them into an expressive, hellish stress-dream of a play that takes its audience as close to the raw terror the troops feel in Baghdad as any of us want to go. As John Humphries interviews Geoff Hoon on the Today programme about sending our troops into ‘The Triangle of Death’ in Central Iraq, we watch the troops touch down in the desert, insurgent fire cracking above them, and mutter, “This wasnae in the adverts, eh?”

Soliders are usually depicted in plays either as flat-stomached, flat-headed heroes or as amoral thugs-for-hire, but Burke (from a military family himself) ditches these twin impostors for blurred reality. One tough-guy soldier sweetly refuses to smoke on camera because “my mum would kill me.” Another – back in our world – cannot cope with having his arm broken in a suicide-bombing where his friends died; every time the arm is close to healing, he cracks the bone again. The play is an immersion-bath in testosterone; you can almost feel your voice deepening and your chest sprouting dark curly hair as you watch. Before the BBC cameras arrive, a commander tells them to take down the pictures of naked women and flash cars because it might give the wrong impression to the Muslim world, but his commander over-rules him. “Good to have a reminder of what we’re here for – porn and petrol,” he says, laughing.

‘Black Watch’ is chaotic, without a clear narrative thrust – a perfect reflection of how the war seems to Our Boys, bewildered about why they are they are in Iraq. At first Iraqis greet them with flowers, kisses and cries of “David Beckham, David Beckham, you know David Beckham?, but within a year they are being mortared. The Iraqi people seem to them an amorphous, inexplicable mass, almost irrelevant to their daily work. The researcher asks them how they felt about the Iraqis, and one answers, “What’s it got to do wi’ them?”

The soldiers experience spasms of doubt – how could they not, when the official reason for the war turn out to be false? One says, “It’s a buzz, eh. You’re in a war. But your no defending your country. You invaded their country. It’s no what you’re trained for. With the difference in fighting, it’s more bullying than fighting.” Some decide to drop out, saying, “I thought it was going to teach me something about the meaning of life. But I was too busy killing folk.” The play swirls these sceptical thoughts into the tedious-terrifying mix of war, where they alternately “blether pish” and sweat in fear. John Tiffany’s production is littered with coups de theatre, where troops emerge from pool tables, an ancestral Black Watch soldier charges through bearing the sword of Robert the Bruce, and, towards the end, a suicide-bombing is depicted with such 10 megaton-force that several audience members looked like they were about to vomit.

But for me, the most startling sequence is where a single Scottish soldier talks us through the history of the Black Watch as the rest of the cast lift and mold him with military precision, fitting the different uniforms of the Watch through the centuries onto his bulky body. “We started before Culloden. We’re used all over the world, mainly in tribal wars. We’re good at that – we’re a tribe ourselves,” he says as he is lifted and dressed like Barbie on steroids. “We fought in the American War of Independence, against the Russians in Crimea, in the Boar War - which wasnae all that boring. We were sent to crush the Mau-Mau in Kenya, to seize Jerusalem, to conquer Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia – where have I heard that before? Oh aye. Here we are. Again.” The question hangs over the audience and over the Edinburgh Festival – is Iraq a rupture with this history, or a black, bleak continuation?

Quand les attentats-suicides ont commencé en Irak, j’appelais à chaque fois mes amis à Bagdad, à Bassora ou à Hilla pour m’assurer qu’ils allaient bien. Mais j’ai vite compris qu’ils détestaient qu’on leur enfonce ainsi chaque bombe dans le crâne : allaient-ils devoir enregistrer un message du genre “Non, je ne suis pas mort dans un attentat-suicide aujourd’hui” et l’envoyer à toutes leurs connaissances trois fois par jour ? J’ai donc décidé d’attendre les journaux du lendemain pour en savoir plus. Aucun n’en parlait. Des attentats aussi sanglants que ceux du 7 juillet 2005 à Londres sont devenus si banals en Irak qu’ils ne méritent pas même une brève.

Après trois ans et au moins 150 000 cadavres irakiens, pouvons-nous encore, nous qui avons soutenu le renversement de Saddam Hussein pour le bien des Irakiens, affirmer que cela en valait la peine ? Je vois déjà rougir de honte tous ceux qui avaient gobé le prétexte manifestement fallacieux des armes de destruction massive.

George Packer, un journaliste récalcitrant qui vit en Irak et qui était plutôt d’accord avec l’invasion, décrit la situation présente : “Les gens ne sont pas libres de dire ce qu’ils pensent, d’appartenir à un groupe donné, de porter ce qu’ils veulent ni même de marcher dans la rue sans risquer leur vie.” Le pouvoir a été transféré de facto à des milices antidémocratiques. Ces gens “imposent leur loi dans les écoles et les hôpitaux, s’en prennent aux femmes non voilées, mettent en place des pseudo-tribunaux qui condamnent à mort au nom de la charia. Leurs bandes criminelles mettent le feu aux magasins qui vendent de l’alcool. Ce sont des agissements de brutes fascistes”. Quand on me demande si j’ai eu tort, je pense à cet ami irakien cloîtré chez lui et qui m’a dit : “Tous les jours tu effaces quelqu’un de ton portable parce qu’il a été tué. Par les Américains, par les djihadistes, par les milices - dans la plupart des cas on ne le saura jamais.” Alors oui, je me dis que j’ai eu tort. Horriblement tort. J’ai un argument faiblard, comme beaucoup de partisans de la guerre en train de virer de bord : le principe de l’invasion était bon, mais c’est le gouvernement Bush qui a merdé. “ Tu parles, m’a rétorqué une amie antiguerre, était-il si difficile d’imaginer qu’un George Bush se plante dans l’invasion illégale d’un pays arabe ?”

Elle a raison : il n’y avait aucun idéal platonicien de l’invasion parfaite à soutenir. Il n’y avait que George Bush, avec ses bombes à fragmentation, son modèle économique tout-FMI et ses raisonnements bidon : il a dicté sa guerre, à sa façon, avec cette odeur de pétrole qui flotte sur tout ce qu’il fait. Et il était illusoire, on le sait aujourd’hui, de compter sur une quelconque influence de Tony Blair, lui qui refuse même de condamner le camp de torture de Guantanamo.

C’était pourtant clair dès le début : avec les hommes de George Bush, le désastre était assuré. Mais qui aurait pu penser qu’ils déclencheraient un phénomène de torture de masse, que plus de 10 000 personnes disparaîtraient sans procès dans les prisons secrètes irakiennes ? C’est simple : tous ceux qui ont suivi les exploits en Amérique centrale des mêmes individus, les Donald Rumsfeld et les John Negroponte, dans les années 1980. Qui aurait imaginé qu’ils utiliseraient des armes chimiques dans une ville habitée par des civils, Fallouja ? Tous ceux qui savent que M. Bush n’a signé aucun traité sur les armes chimiques et que Donald Rumsfeld en a fourgué tant qu’il a pu à des tyrans. Qui aurait envisagé qu’ils privatiseraient massivement l’économie irakienne et feraient flamber le chômage à 60 % - la meilleure garantie de conflit ethnique ? Tous ceux qui se rappellent les thérapies de choc en Russie, en Argentine ou en Asie. Qui aurait cru qu’ils annuleraient les crédits de reconstruction, alors que la distribution d’électricité et d’eau est pire que sous Saddam Hussein ? Tous ceux qui connaissaient leur désengagement, chez eux, du secteur public.

Bien sûr, j’ai toujours su que l’administration Bush voulait avant tout s’assurer le contrôle stratégique des ressources pétrolières. Mais je me disais qu’on pouvait tolérer cette logique répugnante si c’était pour améliorer la situation en Irak. Encore bouleversé par ma visite au pays de Saddam Hussein, je savais que les Irakiens n’avaient qu’une hâte : être débarrassés de leur dictateur, peu importe comment.

Je pensais à la terreur infligée au “peuple des roseaux”, les Madanes (privés de leurs marais et affamés sous Saddam Hussein), et je me disais que cela ne pouvait pas être pire. Comme la plupart des Irakiens, je ne voyais pas qu’une guerre tordue déboucherait sur une occupation tordue ; que dans Bagdad livrée au pillage, l’armée serait envoyée pour garder le ministère du pétrole, pas les hôpitaux. Et ce n’était qu’un début.

Mais il est trop facile de se repentir ici, au calme. Les opposants à la guerre n’avaient pas eu à affronter les salles de torture de Saddam Hussein, et moi, je ne suis pas terré chez moi, tremblant, une kalachnikov à la main. C’est pourtant ce que vivent des millions d’Irakiens. Sans parler de tous ceux qui sont morts, à cause des raisonnements de gens comme moi.

A part Tony Blair et George Bush, à peu près tout le monde y est allé de son mea culpa contrit. Et maintenant ? Iyad Allaoui, l’homme que les Américains s’efforçaient d’imposer avant qu’un mouvement de désobéissance civile emmené par l’ayatollah Sistani rende les élections inévitables, affirme que la guerre civile a déjà commencé. Certains commentateurs de droite ont une fâcheuse tendance à faire porter le chapeau aux Irakiens : on pensait que vous feriez comme les Tchécoslovaques, les gars, mais bon, si vous préférez faire comme les Yougoslaves, pas de problème. D’autres murmurent que l’Irak aurait “besoin d’un Saddam” qui le tienne. Sauf que nous ne sommes pas devant une guerre civile comme au Rwanda ou dans les Balkans, où les voisins se taillaient mutuellement en pièces. C’est une guerre civile imposée d’en haut, livrée par une minorité faite de milices qui prétendent combattre pour préserver l’unité irakienne - à l’exception des djihadistes d’Al-Zarkaoui, très peu nombreux. Jusqu’en 2003, plus de 20 % des mariages irakiens se faisaient entre sunnites et chiites. Les maris vont-ils se retourner contre leur épouse, les mères contre leurs fils ?

Une solution se dessine. Les sondages montrent que la plupart des milices sont soutenues par la population parce qu’elles s’opposent à l’occupation étrangère. Le meilleur moyen de les priver de cet appui est donc de retirer les troupes de la coalition, et tout de suite. Les Irakiens l’ont bien compris : une enquête menée récemment par le ministère de la défense a montré que 80 % des Irakiens souhaitent le départ “immédiat” des troupes afin de pouvoir eux-mêmes s’occuper des djihadistes et des fondamentalistes. Comme en écho, un sondage de l’institut Zogby auprès des soldats américains a révélé que 72 % sont favorables à un désengagement dans l’année. Guerre surréaliste entre occupés et occupants malgré eux.

Certes, le retrait risque de créer un vide politique qu’exploiteraient les milices, mais c’est déjà le cas aujourd’hui. Il est donc grand temps de quitter l’Irak. Reste une question lancinante : le gouvernement Bush va-t-il renoncer au pétrole irakien après avoir dépensé 200 milliards de dollars pour s’en emparer, simplement parce que le peuple irakien et ses propres soldats le lui demandent ?

A few weeks ago, a small moment – a little line of text – underlined for me how far life in Iraq has slumped. As I was reading a story, the ticker-tape on the BBC News website casually stated: ‘Car bomb in Baghdad; 50 dead.’ There were no accompanying details. When these Iraqi suicide-massacres started to happen in Iraq, I would nervously call my friends out in Baghdad and Basra and Hilla to make sure they were okay. But I soon realised this was antagonising them, driving every bomb further into their skulls – should they store a standard text ‘No, not killed in suicide bomb today’ message and send it out three times a day? So I swallowed hard, waited, and the next day, I looked through all the newspapers for details. Nobody mentioned it. Suicide-slaughters the size of 7/7 are now so common they don’t even bleed into News in Brief.

So after three years and at least 150,000 Iraqi corpses, can those of us who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein for the Iraqis’ sake still claim it was worth it? (I am assuming the people who bought the obviously fictitious arguments about WMD are already hanging their heads in shame). George Packer, a recalcitrant Iraq-based journalist who tentatively supported the invasion, summarises the situation in the country today: “Most people aren’t free to speak their minds, belong to a certain group, wear what they want, or even walk down the street without risking their lives.” In many regions – including the British controlled South – power has been effectively ceded to fascist militias who “take over schools and hospitals, intimidate the staffs, assaulted unveiled women, set up kangaroo sharia courts that issue death sentences, repeatedly try to seize control of the holy shrines, run criminal gangs, firebomb liquor stores, and are often drunk themselves. Their tactics are those of fascist bullies.”

So when people ask if I think I was wrong, I think about the Iraqi friend – hiding, terrified, in his own house – who said to me this week, “Every day you delete another name from your mobile, because they’ve been killed. By the Americans or the jihadists or the militias – usually you never find out which.” I think of the people trapped in the siege of a civilian city, Fallujah, where amidst homes and schools the Americans indiscriminately used a banned chemical weapon – white phosphorous – that burns through skin and bone. (The Americans say they told civilians to leave the city, so anybody left behind was a suspected jihadi – an evacuation procedure so successful they later used it in New Orleans.). I think of the raw numbers: on the largest estimate – from the Human Rights Centre in Khadimiya – Saddam was killing 70,000 people a year. The occupation and the jihadists have topped that, and the violence is getting worse. And I think – yes, I was wrong. Terribly wrong.

The lamest defence I could offer – one used by many supporters of the war as they slam into reverse gear – is that I still support the principle of invasion, it’s just the Bush administration screwed it up. But as one anti-war friend snapped at me when I mooted this argument, “Yeah, who would ever have thought that supporting George Bush in the illegal invasion of an Arab country would go wrong?” She’s right: the truth is that there was no pure Platonic ideal of The Perfect Invasion to support, no abstract idea we lent our names to. There was only Bush, with his cluster bombs, depleted uranium, IMF-ed up economic model, bogus rationale and unmistakable stench of petrol, offering his war, his way. (Expecting Tony Blair to use his influence was, it is now clear, a delusion, as he refuses to even frontally condemn the American torture camp at Guantanomo Bay).

The evidence should have been clear to me all along: the Bush administration would produce disaster. Let’s look at the major mistakes-cum-crimes. Who would have thought they would unleash widespread torture, with over 10,000 people disappearing without trial into Iraq’s secret prisons? Anybody who followed the record of the very same people – from Rumsfeld to Negroponte – in Central America in the 1980s. Who would have thought they would use chemical weapons? Anybody who looked up Bush’s stance on chemical weapons treaties (he uses them for toilet paper) or checked Rumsfeld’s record of flogging them to tyrants. Who would have thought they would impose shock therapy mass privatisation on the Iraqi economy, sending unemployment soaring to 60 percent – a guarantee of ethnic strife? Anybody who followed the record of the US towards Russia, Argentina, and East Asia. Who could have known that they would cancel all reconstruction funds, when electricity and water supplies are still below even Saddam’s standards? Anybody who looked at their domestic policies.

The Bush administration was primarily motivated by a desire to secure strategic access to one of the world’s major sources of oil. The 9/11 massacres by Saudi hijackers had reminded them that their favourite client-state – the one run by the torturing House of Saud – was vulnerable to an internal Islamist revolution that would snatch the oil-wells from Haliburton hands. They needed an alternative source of Middle East oil, fast. I obviously found this rationale disgusting, but I deluded myself into thinking it was possible to ride this beast to a better Iraq. Reeling from a visit to Saddam’s Iraq, I knew that Iraqis didn’t care why their dictator was deposed, they just wanted it done, now. As I thought of the ethnically cleansed Marsh Arabs I had met, reduced to living in a mud hut in the desert, I thought that whatever happens, however it occurs, it will be better. In that immediate rush, I – like most Iraqis – failed to see that the Bush administration’s warped motives would lead to a warped occupation. A war for oil would mean that as Baghdad was looted, troops would be sent to guard the oil ministry, not the hospitals – a bleak harbinger of things to come.

But it is easy for me to repent at leisure. Just as the opponents of the war would never have faced Saddam’s torture chambers, I am not hiding in my home, rocking and clutching a Kalashnikov. Millions of Iraqis are, and many thousands more did not live to see even that future because of the arguments of people like me.

And so, after the melancholic mea culpas from almost everyone but Blair and Bush, what? Iyaad Allawi – the man the Americans tried to impose as Prime Minister until a massive programme of peaceful civil disobedience spearheaded by the Ayatollah Sistani made elections unavoidable – says a low-level civil war has already begun. There has been a worrying trend among some right-wing commentators to blame the Iraqis: we though you guys would be a Czechoslovakia, but if you insist on being a Yugoslavia, fine. There have even been evil whispers that Iraq “needs a Saddam” to hold it together. But this is not a grassroots civil war a la Rwanda or the Lebanon, where neighbour hacks to pieces neighbour. It is a top-down civil war, fought by a minority of militias, all of whom (apart from the jihadi-Zarquawi crowd, who are a very small minority) claim to fight in the name of keeping Iraq together. Until 2003, over 20 percent of Iraqi marriages were across the Sunni-Shia divide – is husband now going to turn on wife, and mother on son?

It is very hard to see a solution, but I believe the threads of one are visible. The polls show that most of these violent militias draw their support from the fact that they oppose the foreign troops, not from the fact that they massacre fellow-Iraqis. So the best way to drain their support – and dampen the inertia towards civil war – is to withdraw the troops now. Iraqis can see this very clearly: a poll recently conducted by the Ministry of Defence (hardly an anti-war source) found that 80 percent of Iraqis want out “immediately” so they can deal with the remaining jihadists and anti-democratic fundamentalists themselves. (In a revealing mirror-image, a Zogby poll of US troops in Iraq found that 72 percent believe the occupation should end within the year. This will soon be a surreal war where the unwilling occupy the unwilling.)

Yes, there is a danger that withdrawal will create a power vacuum exploited by militias, but that is the reality on the ground already. It is unquestionably time to leave Iraq – but will the Bush administration surrender Iraq’s oil, after spending $200bn to grab it, just because the Iraqi people and their own troops want them to?

POSTSCRIPT: There's been a collosal response to this article and I'm still picking through the e-mails. Over fifty from Iraqis, of which some mournfully agree, although this e-mail was more typical:

"Your article in the Independent today, 20/3/2006, was really disappointing to all of your admirers. You let them down. You changed your mind and switched from pro-war to join the anti-war campaigners, means that you gave in bowed to the aggressors. So instead of blaming the terrorists for this mass killing in Iraq at the hand of the terrorists, you put the blame on Bush and Blair for liberating Iraqi people from the worst dictator in history. If your new stance is right, then it was wrong to stand up against Hitler in the WW II, because that war caused humanity 55 million casualties. So it was better not oppose the Axis sates. Is that fair? Is this is the justice that we are looking for? If the tyrants were left to do as they like because of the possible revenge from their followers, then our glob will be place for the tyrants only and the whole planet population will be living like sheep.

Abdulkhaliq Hussein"

HEADLINE: Damned If You Do, Saddam If You Don't

BYLINE: Radhakrishnan Nayar

BODY:
A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq Edited by Thomas Cushman University of California Press, 372pp, Pounds 35.95 and Pounds 13.95 ISBN 0 520 24486 9 and 24555 5

Together with an unending line of corpses torn apart by bombs and bullets, the Iraq war produced a singularly frenzied debate among Western intellectuals about the rights and wrongs of the US invasion. This richly informative book is a collection of essays almost all by pro-intervention writers. They explain what led them to a position hugely derided by the majority of the Western intelligentsia.

Some of the essayists are troubled by the practical sensibleness of America's actions, however sound the moral case. But only one opposes the invasion. Another, Johann Hari, though a supporter of the conquest, regards the motives behind it as suspect.

The best example of the ebullient drum beater for George W. Bush is probably Christopher Hitchens. In his usual truculent, monotonous prose, he sets out the reasons why his own erstwhile Western leftwing friends are so contemptibly wrong. Norman Geras, Ian Buruma, Anne Clwyd and others follow in a similar vein, drawing up, in the name of liberal internationalism, an apparently devastating moral indictment of anti-war liberal and leftwing opinion.

The case that emerges from nearly all these contributors' advocacy might be summarised thus: America, despite many deplorable mistakes, stands for humanitarianism in Iraq. A frivolous, kneejerk anti-Americanism has led much Western opinion culpably to ignore the fact that the terrifying human toll exacted by Saddam Hussein's regime would have continued had the US not deposed him. The despot's practices are well known: feeding victims into mincing machines, the use of meat hooks and poison gas. How can supposed liberals and leftwingers oppose acting to dispose of such a monster on grounds of Iraqi "sovereignty"? Even if no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were uncovered, why should the US regime have taken the risk of Saddam developing them?

Besides, the US is involved in something vital in the post-September 11 era: introducing liberalism into the Middle East. Subjects of tyranny elsewhere in the Middle East will see it is possible in the area to favour democracy and the US at the same time: a badly needed demonstration. And what if the US has been - and away from Iraq still is - the underwriter of cruel dictatorships in the Muslim world? Is the US forbidden to do good in Iraq because of its malign record in the region hitherto? As for armed resistance in Iraq to the US, opponents of the war are often appallingly oblivious to its ferociously Islamist nature.

A lot of what these writers say is true. Saddam's regime was one of murder and torture on a huge scale. Many prominent spokesmen for the Western anti-war movement - such as Michael Moore, John Pilger, George Galloway, Tariq Ali and George Monbiot - do indeed tend to demonise the US and overlook the heinous nature of its armed Islamist enemies. The victory of America's armed opponents would immensely boost militant Islam at its worst. It would impose a Taleban-style regime on Iraq and push the Middle East, and much of the rest of the world, into serious trouble.

Nonetheless, a comparison with George Orwell indicates what is wrong with these writers. Their case for Saddam's removal is formidable; but they show strikingly few doubts about US motives. Though sometimes bemoaning America's practical blunders in Iraq, they - with two exceptions - act as earnest spokesmen for Washington. (Tony Blair, supposedly representing "liberal statesmanship", is given two chapters to expound his views.) Orwell would not have fallen into that trap. He was a mordant critic of all established powers, not merely totalitarian ones. He chose Britain and the US against Nazi Germany, but he made it clear this was a forced choice of a lesser evil. He looked forward eagerly to the British Empire's demolition by anticolonial movements. He knew that to ascribe anything like consistently altruistic motives to powerful governments was folly.

These essayists lack Orwell's subtlety. They have nothing of his strongest trait as a political polemicist: refusal to underplay the negative aspects of the side he himself has to choose. They do not see that a very strong humanitarian case can be made against US invasion, too. Even if some kind of democracy comes to Iraq, it will be beholden to US power. Indeed, after their easy routing of Saddam's armies, the US forces gave every indication of settling in for a prolonged quasi-colonial rule of the world's second largest oil reserve. None of these essayists notes that it was the unexpected effectiveness of the Iraqi guerrilla resistance after Baghdad's fall that led the US to concede even theoretical sovereignty to Iraqis and hold elections without delay. Thus, uncomfortably for those who wish to see democracy in Iraq and a US willing to leave, progress has been dependent on blows struck by a viciously inhuman armed resistance. And what if the US does secure untroubled victory? This may well encourage Washington to move against Iran and/or Syria. In short, US victory, too, is likely to push the region and much of the rest of the world to the threshold of serious trouble.

Hari alone recognises that although Saddam's overthrow was hugely desirable, the US presence in Iraq is very problematic. Obviously, the ruthless resistance is not an alternative. Hari claims to have found a way out of this conundrum. Siding with the Iraqi people is the only decent choice, he argues. Opinion polls, he notes, indicate that the majority of Iraqis fervently wanted Saddam's Government smashed, even by a US invasion.

However, it is also clear that most now want the US out quickly, though - contradictorily - not until the Iraqi Army can cope with the Islamist insurgents. Hari is free of the credulity about US motives afflicting his fellow essayists. Yet even if Iraqi majority opinion is what he claims all it has needed to turn much of Iraq into hell is an armed minority. Hari does not indicate how US power can be controlled. We need a disinterested force to free the Iraqs of our world from their Saddam Husseins. No such force is in sight. Until we have it, those who believe that strong pro and anti positions can be taken in conflicts of this kind without associating oneself with wanton bloodshed and corruption are purveying an illusion.

Radhakrishnan Nayar is a writer on international affairs.

On Saturday, Iraqis will give the purple finger once more to the suicide-murderers when they queue in their millions to vote on their country's new constitution.

An Iraqi friend of mine who drove voters to the polls in the last election in January remembers an incredible scene: "There was a long snaking queue at the polling station in the south of Baghdad that I was assigned to. I left to pick up one family and, by the time I got back, a man had blown himself up when he got near the front of the queue. But it was amazing to see that, after the initial commotion, everybody was queuing up again. They just rejoined the line, and, as they walked past what was left of the body of this guy, they spat on him and went in to cast their votes."

This week, there will be another act of national heroism on the part of the Iraqi people. So it is particularly cruel that the constitution they are being presented with this weekend - the constitution they will risk everything for - is based on a lie.

The theory is simple: in January, Iraqis elected an assembly to draw up the constitution. This week, they get to approve or reject it. At the end, we will have an Iraqi constitution written, signed and sealed by the Iraqi people and their democratic representatives.

I was in Saddam's terrified, terrorised Iraq when he held his last "referendum" - the one where he magically received 100 per cent of the vote - so there is nothing I would like more than for this to all be true. But Herbert Docena, an Iraq-based journalist writing for the Asia Times, has exposed it as a propaganda myth. The truth is that the constitution written by Iraq's democratic representatives has been boiled, stirred and reduced by representatives of the Bush administration to make it match not the will of the Iraqi people but the whims of American investors. The Iraqi people are being asked to vote on a drained, stained simulacra of the constitution written by their elected representatives.

The first draft of Iraq's constitution - worked out by Shia, Sunni and Kurd negotiators - was leaked in June to the Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada, and it was very different to George Bush's vision of Iraq. No, it did not propose an Islamic fundamentalist state, even though some glib, semi-racist observers assume a bunch of rag-heads would come up with nothing less. It proposed something even more threatening to US interests in the developing world: a social democracy where Iraqis have full rights to health care, free education, and - wait for it - full ownership of their own natural resources.

It declared "social justice is the basis of building Iraqi society". This was spelled out as meaning a mixed economy where the state would take the lead in promoting development, supplying public services and "providing work opportunities for every able-bodied citizen". And - most radically - there was a guarantee that "all natural resources [read: oil] are owned by the people. The state shall preserve and invest in them well".

The Bush administration panicked. Across the world, the US imposes a very different economic model through its proxies, the IMF and the World Bank. They demand poor countries adopt a small-state, low-tax model based on slashing public provision for health and education and handing profit-soaked resources like oil to multinational corporations. (Purely by coincidence, these same corporations fund the Republican Party and its campaigns).

Since the fall of Saddam, the Bush administration has been trying to swing Iraq from one extreme - a Stalinist dictatorship where everything was the property of one crazed crime family - to this alternative model. As the New York Times columnist Jeff Madrick noted: "By any mainstream economist's standard, the plan... is extreme. In fact, it's stunning." The Bush administration claimed it was bringing "US-style capitalism", but this was far more extreme than anything tried in Texas. They stripped out Iraq's public sector entirely, and sent unemployment soaring to 70 per cent. The Economist noted dryly they had followed "the wish-list of international investors", and sold off anything that wasn't nailed to the ground.

So it wouldn't do for puny Iraqi democrats to try to reverse these achievements in the constitution itself, armed with nothing but the will of the Iraqi people. After a series of long sessions with Zalmay Khalilzad, a former Unocal employee and now US ambassador to Iraq, this social democratic Iraqi constitution disappeared. Social justice evaporated: it was replaced with a commitment to "reforming the Iraqi economy" to ensure "complete investment of its resources" in a "modern" way.

The commitment to collective ownership of Iraq's oil disappeared: instead, it was to be subject to "modern techniques of market principles" - handed over to Bush's corporate friends for private profit. The commitment to public health care and education was suddenly subject to a series of clauses: they must involve the private sector, and provision will be "within the limits of the government's resources". The supremacy of US interests over the Iraqi will was reasserted.

And this caused a ripple-effect. After a close study of the different drafts, Docena concluded that the disturbing religious provisions in the constitution - like the use of Islamic law - only crept in as the social democratic provisions were stripped out.

"In the quid pro quo, investors' rights trumped women's rights," he explains. Suddenly, passages subjecting Iraqi women (who make up 60 per cent of the population) to male supremacy and Mullah-filled courts began to creep in. In other words, the Bush administration sold out Iraqi women so they could sell off Iraqi assets.

The Bush administration is trying to integrate its economic occupation of Iraq - in many ways worse than the military occupation - into the constitution. This will make the development of normal, class-based politics in Iraq impossible. Since Iraqi politicians don't control the economy and are powerless to affect the second-biggest issue in the country after security - unemployment - the country has divided even more along sectarian, tribal lines.

Another Iraq is possible. Not a return to Saddam's psychosis, nor a capitulation to the jihadists who blow up polling booths and the UN headquarters - but not Bush's neoliberal oil-colony either. It is the Iraq outlined in the first, real constitution, chosen by Iraqis themselves: a social democratic Iraq where unemployment (and the recruiting pool for jihadi death-cults) is slowly eroded, where health and education services are built up by the government, and where every cent of profit from Iraq's oil flows into the Iraqi exchequer.

After all they have endured and all the courage they have shown, Iraqis deserve to be allowed to choose that Iraq this Saturday. But while we are addicted to their oil and while corporations own America's political parties, the prospect of real Iraqi democracy is depressingly distant.

POSTSCRIPT: Feedback welcome at johann@johannhari.com

Also, if you hate the design of this website (as some people apparently do), then a lovely tecchie person has set up a filter for this website that offers a plain black-on-white text version of all the articles. It's at http://tunnie.com/johannhari.com/

"The stampede a fortnight ago gives you a window into how Iraqis are coping," a friend who has just returned from Baghdad explains. "7/7 would be a light day here. So one shout of 'suicide-bomber' was enough to send a crowd immediately into complete panic, to set men trampling over women, and make people barge children into the river. Everybody is one yell away from hysteria. It's a society in the middle of a nervous breakdown."

For anybody who supported the war, the images of British forces fighting against the Iraqi police in Basra - two and a half years after the war was supposed to be over - forces difficult questions like needles: is Iraq today 100,000 deaths better off than under Saddam Hussein? Is the choice now between cut-and-run, or stay and cut-cut-cut into Iraqi flesh with a monthly Fallujah or Tal Afar?

Before the war, I believed the best route through the Bush-Baathism stand-off was to find out what Iraqis preferred. Would they rather face the looming horrors of an Anglo-American invasion, or the existing horrors of Saddam, his sons and sanctions? I thought the left should side with oppressed peoples, especially those bleeding under a fascist dictatorship, and amplify their voices.

And they were speaking - through their democratic government in northern Iraq which had been clawed back from Saddam in 1991, through the exiled spokesmen who represented a quarter of the Iraqi population, and through a limited number of secret polls conducted within the country. And their verdict? They thought the WMD arguments were obviously lies, they thought the US was in this for oil and Israel, they hated Bush - but they still preferred the invasion to living in an abattoir-state for another generation.

When the invasion ended, and opinion polls - using the same techniques that successfully predict elections across the world - found that most Iraqis had preferred the invasion, I felt, pretty smugly, that I had been right. Much of the left had lined up with Robin Cook, a man who said continuing with the sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children was "the best option". Or, worse, they were cheering George Galloway, who is now busy saluting another Baathist dictator in Syria and telling the people how "lucky" they are to live under his tyranny. But I had lined up with the majority of Iraqi people.

Today, this confidence seems stupid - and when it comes to the worst things about the occupation, there is no get-out clause, no 'who could have predicted ...?' wriggle-room: they could be seen in outline before 2003. An administration that offers positions to thugs like John Negroponte and Henry Kissinger was clearly, systematically going to use torture.

(Just after the war, I wrote: "Although the looting is bad, at least nobody is being tortured in Iraq today." This was wrong: the US torture had already begun, and I should have known it.)

The Bush administration was always going to hand a bleeding Iraq to the IMF to use as a neoliberal plaything - with the glorious result that Iraqi unemployment has hit 70 per cent in Basra, and the insurgents have been handed an ocean of bored, angry young men to pick from.

I made a naive assumption that the juggernaut of US military power would overlap with the wishes of Iraqis for more than a fleeting, accidental moment. It wasn't so. In the most recent scientific poll of Iraqis - conducted by Gallup this summer - 52 per cent said that had viewed the troops as "liberators" at first, but now believed the US-British military action in Iraq could not be justified and should end immediately. Some 46 per cent said "the coalition invasion of Iraq has done more harm than good", and only 33 per cent disagreed.

This week, I called my Iraqi friends and admitted that it was becoming increasingly impossible to defend the invasion. They are living in a society trapped between the systematic violence of the occupiers and the crazed ideologies of the "resistance", trying desperately to carve out a space where they can be free. They had more important things to worry about than my bleating.

Yasser Alaskary described leading a training course in Baghdad about democratic government: "The people our age who came - it was weird. You knew they were risking their lives to be there. You knew if it got out they were considering standing for election, they could be killed by these jihadist forces."

He paused and said, "But you can't think we would be better off with Saddam and Uday and Qusay?" No, I said, but 100,000 corpses ... and what about the polls? He pointed out a tension in the Gallup poll - a tension that runs right through the heart of every Iraqi. Even as they said they despised Bush, Blair and the coalition troops, when they were asked the question, "Thinking about any hardships you might have suffered since the US/British invasion, do you personally think that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth it or not?", 61 per cent of Iraqis still say it was and 28 per cent say it wasn't. Only 4 per cent think the tyrant could have been toppled without an outside invasion. (The dead are not around to be polled, though, nor are the tens of thousands vanished into Iraq's new secret prisons.)

So is there still a justification here for 100,000 deaths and $200bn of spending, or am I clutching at bloody straws? Maybe I will be expelled from the columnists' trade union for saying this, but I don't know, and until we see what happens next in Iraq - a fightback by democrats against the jihadis, or a civil war - it is increasingly hard to form a judgement.

More importantly, does this tell us anything about where to go from here? We faced a bad set of options on the way into this conflict - Saddam or his old arms-dealer Rumsfeld - and we have to realise that on the way out, we face another lousy set of choices: stay and watch the jihadist insurgency grow like yeast until - what? - or go and abandon Iraqi democrats, trade unionists and feminists, those brave people Yasser is training, to a fascistic onslaught.

Yet in running through these options, it is disturbing to see everybody acting - yet again - as if Iraqis do not have voices to speak for themselves. Perhaps my logic has been hideously flawed all along and it was wrong to take the will of Iraqis as my sole moral compass. But if we take the idea of Iraqi democracy seriously, then the only people who can decide which of these bleak choices is best are the Iraqis.

Those of us who want to support them should be calling for a referendum - to be held at the same time as next month's ballot on the constitution - asking simply, "Would you like the foreign troops to remain for another year?" (The polls suggest they would tell them to go so Iraqis can fight the jihadis alone). If you go into a war siding with Iraqis, you have to go out siding with them: against Saddam, jihadism and endless occupation, and for real democracy.

Standing on a thousand of those bridges, ever-alert for a cry of "Bomber!", Iraqis have never needed our solidarity more than now.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

As the arguments about the Iraqi constitution echo somewhere in the distance, it's frighteningly easy to be apocalyptic about Iraq. When 7/7 happens 24/7 and it's Bloody Sunday every bloody day, are legalistic arguments about constitutional clauses just a distraction from the meltdown of Mesopotamia?

Nobody who follows the situation in Iraq can have failed, by now, to have the darkest nightmare of all: of intractable civil war, with Baathists and Islamists determined to humiliate the Shia majority and the Americans by creating an abattoir on every street corner that achieves peace. And the disaster spirals: this would leave Iraq with an Anglo-American occupying force - equipped with its own centres of torture and mass imprisonment - unable to glue the country back together again, but also unable to withdraw and admit political humiliation for Bush and Blair. Cue Macbeth: "I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more / Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

But this vision is not inevitable. Another Iraq is possible, and, buried beneath the carnage and rubble, the Iraqi people fervently, desperately want to make it happen. The constitution published this weekend was drafted by Iraq's elected politicians. You remember them: the people whom eight million Iraqis risked their lives and dodged suicide-murderers to vote for back in the spring. After months of deliberation and negotiation, it turns out their proposed Iraq is "republican, democratic and pluralistic", with guaranteed regular elections, a free press, 25 per cent of parliament designated for women (far more than in the US Congress), and Kurdish - once an underground language punishable by torture - now one of Iraq's official languages.

Of course a constitution is only a piece of paper. Joseph Stalin wrote a constitution for the Soviet Union in 1936 that sounds mouth-wateringly free: total free speech, the right to demonstrate, even the right to not have to work overtime. No doubt these constitutional rights were a great comfort to the 10 million people worked to death in the gulags. So the Iraqi constitution, in itself, is a guarantee of nothing: only social movements, constantly pressuring a government over decades, can ensure that rights-on-paper become rights-in-real-life. But the constitution is significant none the less because it shows us what that other Iraq would look like, if only the clear majority of Iraqis could raise their voices above the gunfire and screaming.

Yet they remain trapped between two gun-toting forces, unable to assert their will. To one side there is the Anglo-American occupying army, whose leaders are primarily concerned with control of the oil supply in the Middle East and the establishment of long-term military bases. They have been flogging off Iraq's assets as if on eBay, imposing a form of neo-liberalism that has caused unemployment to hit 70 per cent. Worse still, they have been using Abu Ghraib-style torture on a wide scale and, according to Newsweek, are considering the "Salvador option" for Iraq - the deliberate targeting of Sunni civilians in order to terrorise them out of supporting the terrorists. (Yes, you spotted the flaw in their logic.)

To the other side is the "resistance", which is fissiparous and divided. There are still some remnants of the old Shia uprising, a mainly-justified movement that was angry at the delaying of elections and the arbitrary violence committed by many occupying troops. There was considerable popular sympathy for them, but mostly, these people have become part of the constitutional process and put their guns away (at least for now).

But the other shards of the resistance – now dominant – command very, very little sympathy among Iraqis. The Baathist wing seeks to regain power for the Sunni minority, and is butchering its way across Baghdad just as they did before 2003. The Islamist wing - calling itself al-Qa'ida in Iraq - wants to establish a Taliban state where, in their own words, "we will fight a bitter war against democracy and all those who seek to practice it".

Contrary to the conservative assumption that backward, tribal Arabs like tyranny, the great mass of Iraqis reject these visions as well. In every opinion poll and at their chance to vote, they showed they want all the boring, beautiful things of a stable life: democracy, federalism, power-sharing. And not the cosmetic-democracy of George Bush's propaganda either, but a real and deep democracy.

So how can those of us motivated by solidarity support the Iraqi majority against all comers? There are hundreds of independent groups we can support inside Iraq who are trying - in the most terrifying circumstances - to fight for a genuinely free Iraq. The Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq is campaigning against Islamist attempts to subject women to sharia law. (They have successfully kept it out of the constitution, although there are still worrying references to Islam as a "primary source of law" alongside promises to protect human rights). Oil workers across Iraq are fighting and striking to prevent the profits from Iraq's oil leaking out of the country and into the bank accounts of foreign corporations.

But what should we be trying to force our government to do? In the long term, we must work to change how our own societies work and build a world where the choices are far better than Bush vs Baathism. That would require us to build a very different foreign policy, independent of corporate interests and a thirst for oil. But Iraqis cannot afford to wait until then. What's the right cry right now for people who want to support Iraqis: troops out or troops remain?

The only principled answer is to take our lead from the Iraqi people. It is their country, and only they know what is best for it. Only Iraqis on the ground can tell which is the greater risk for them: a possible Islamist-Baathist takeover, or leaving the Anglo-American troops (with their torture and forced neo-liberalism) in place to fend them off.

There is a simple policy you can advocate that would place this decision directly into the hands of Iraqis. When the people of Iraq vote on the constitution on 15 October, they should also be asked a referendum question: do you want the coalition forces to remain for another year, or leave immediately?

Of course, the Bush administration would not want to hold such a referendum. They want to stay, build their bases, drill the oil and manipulate the elected Iraqi government for some time to come. But the Bushies did not want to hold an election last spring either. Their original plan was to appoint a pliant "constitutional convention" and only face the voters much later in 2006. Pressure within and outside Iraq forced them to change their minds; it could do so again.

Many people - settled into comfortable assumptions about what is happening in Iraq - would find the prospect of giving the Iraqis a say discomforting. To the "Troops Out Now" campaigners, it asks: would you really advocate a withdrawal against the wishes of most Iraqis? And to the stay-the-course-no-matter-what bombardiers, it asks: would you want to stay if you knew the Iraqis had voted to toss you out? What's your slogan - we'll liberate them whether they damn well like it or not? It's a simple chant, and the only moral one left: All Power to the Iraqis.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

There are days I feel like I have been a cheerleader for mass murder. More than 150,000 Iraqis have died in the war I supported. (I am including the Iraqi soldiers; they were conscripted, terrified young men, and they should not be left out of the death counts). Malnutrition among Iraqi children is up. The country is littered with carcinogenic depleted uranium shells. Human Rights Watch says human rights abuses are happening right now in Iraq, and Fallujah is a bloody pile of rubble.

I keep thinking about the people I met in Iraq before the war, and wondering if they made it through. And the question keeps recurring: is Iraq - and the wider Middle East - sufficiently better to justify all that death?

And then a coincidence of timing happens, and the arguments become clear again. Yesterday, British politics was gripped by the release of the Attorney General's legal advice. But something else was happening too: Iraq's first democratic government was formed, and the President was trying to speak to us.

Jalal Talabani is a Kurdish human rights lawyer - something of an advance on Saddam Hussein. President Talabani said, "In the eyes of a majority of Iraqis, it was you who brought us our own equivalent of VE Day. Of course, the liberation of Iraq was controversial, as all wars should be. But Saddam's war against the Iraqi people was ongoing; we have evidence which demonstrates that the regime was executing its challengers until the last day of its rule. It was that war, lasting almost 40 years, which was the true war of Iraq. It was never controversial, never discussed, simply ordered and executed by him and his thugs. Our struggle for a better, emancipated Iraq now is only possible because of the coalition of the willing."

What should matter more to us when we judge the legality and morality of this war - the advice of the Attorney General and People Like Us, or the advice of the Iraqi people and their elected representatives? For me, this has always been the central question in the rows about Iraq. Back in 2003, when it became clear there might be a war in Iraq, I thought the principle that should determine my position was pretty simple: what do the Iraqi people want? I did everything I could to find out - from visiting Iraq to traipsing around London's centres for Iraqi refugees. But it was strange to discover that most people didn't want to hear about the opinion of Iraqis. The pro-war people justified their actions on the basis of WMD; the anti-war people just assumed they had the Iraqis onside.

At every step of the way, British people acted as though the argument about Iraq was a proxy for something else: a row about American power, or about pre-emptive war, or about Tony Blair's proximity to Bush. Too many of us chose our positions on that basis, not on the basis of solidarity with Iraqis.

There was a small, perfect moment a few months ago that symbolised this refusal to listen. Tony Blair was being interviewed by June Sarpong before a hostile studio audience, and the Prime Minister was talking flatly about Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction. The studio was filled - rightly - with jeering. They knew there were no WMD, and they demanded to know: wasn't this war about oil, or Israel, or a raw assertion of US power post-9/11?

The row continued for five fruitless minutes, with Blair begging the audience not to question his integrity, and the audience in turn begging to know the real reasons why he went to war.

And then a small, level voice came from the front row. "I am an Iraqi," a young woman said, "and I have just come back from my country. I know this war was not about Weapons of Mass Destruction, and I know the Americans did not do this because they care about us. But all of my family in Iraq supported this war, and so did I. We did it because we knew there was no other way to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Why can't you all understand that? Why can't you side with us?"

There was a long pause. The audience looked nonplussed. Nobody spoke. And then the row about WMD burst out again, furious and fiery. Everybody carried on as if the Iraqi had not spoken. Blair tried to gesture at one point towards the Iraqi woman when his WMD argument was manifestly flagging, but nobody wanted to hear.

The debate about the legality of the war is a restaging of that studio debate on a national scale. The Iraqis are trying to speak, but because what they have to say fits into neither Blair's "Get the WMD!" script nor the Stop the War argument, nobody is listening.

Here is what Iraqis have persistently said about the war, in all the opinion polls and now through their elected representatives: They wanted the invasion to proceed. (Asked the simple question "Do you think America and Britain's war against Saddam's regime was right or wrong?", 50 per cent said to YouGov it was right and only 27 per cent said it was wrong.) But like all sane people, Iraqis did not think the American and British governments had altruistic motives for invading. They thought the WMD rationale was an absurd lie, with only 6 per cent of Iraqis describing it as the motive for invasion. Some 46 per cent thought (probably correctly) it was to get access to Iraq's oil and 41 per cent thought it was to help Israel - but they still supported it, because Saddam was the alternative.

Once Saddam was gone, they wanted elections as soon as possible and for the occupation to end. They have stuck to this position absolutely consistently.

But when it comes to legality, you have to answer a basic question: who is sovereign in Iraq? If you believe the Iraqi people are sovereign, then there was no crime, because Iraqis and now their elected government say they wanted the invasion to proceed. You can't invade the willing. The problem is that currently international law does not recognise peoples as sovereign. Incredible though it seems, right up until the moment he was forced from power, international law regarded Saddam Hussein's government as sovereign.

That cannot be right, and that cannot be a law worth defending. I support the idea of international law; but protecting the sovereignty of tyrants - against the will of their people - is a perversion of the benevolent instincts that lead people to seek lawfare not warfare.

Yet still the idea gnaws at me: is the will of the Iraqi people too thin a thread on which to hang the justification for a £200bn invasion and occupation? I remain certain of one thing though: the answers to these questions will only ever come from the Iraqi people and men like Jalal Talabani, and never from a remote British lawyer.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

POSTSCRIPT: If you want to show solidarity with Iraqis now - in their fight against Islamic fundamentalists, Ba'athists, IMF 'structural adjustment' and imposed neoliberalism - please go to www.iraqitradeunions.org and donate what you can.

I was e-mailed this report on m'debate with Robert Fisk a few weeks back. The event was videoed as well - I'm trying to find a way to post it on the website, anybody interested should keep hassling me to make sure I do it. If anyone else knows of any other reports, do let me know.

"Do Developments in Iraq Validate Opposition to War?
Neil Berry, albionroad@tiscali.co.uk

Strenuously opposed to the war in Iraq, The Independent has covered the conflict with greater consistency than any other British newspaper. The quality of its coverage has owed much to the heroic efforts of Robert Fisk, a journalist who has been reporting on the Middle East for a quarter of a century, never making any secret of his abhorrence of US meddling in the region. It is safe to say that many take the Independent specifically to read Fisk’s fiery dispatches.

Last Wednesday, on the eve of the Iraq elections, the veteran correspondent flew into London from Baghdad to take part in a debate organized by the Independent on whether critics of the war in Iraq have been vindicated. Joining him to speak against the war was the dissenting US political journalist, Charles Glass. Ranged against the two men were the Labour politician and government spokesman, Eric Joyce, and the prolific young Independent columnist, Johann Hari. A voluble champion of the case for toppling Saddam Hussein, the latter has enabled the Independent to sustain an anti-war posture without compromising its much-vaunted commitment to free thinking.

At the outset, the debate threatened to turn into the Robert Fisk Show. For scarcely had Editor in Chief Simon Kellner introduced the Independent’s most celebrated contributor than the 750-strong audience at Church House, Westminster, erupted into furious applause. The ruddy-faced Fisk — who was sporting a heavily bandaged forearm, as if to advertise his penchant for living dangerously — looked embarrassed and delighted in equal measure.

Such was the fervor of Fisk’s admirers that the pro-war speakers seemed in danger of being shouted down. In the event, Hari and Joyce were accorded a grudgingly respectful hearing. Anxious to rebut claims that the British government had acted in bad faith, Joyce pointed out that the British government had been far from alone in believing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction: Prior to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, this was after all the common consensus among Western governments. As for the current crisis in Iraq, Joyce insisted that it was wrong to “rush to judgment”. In his view, the stated objectives of bringing democracy to Iraq and improving the lives of Iraqi people were eminently achievable.

Brimming with youthful energy, Hari said he never believed the official justification of the war that Saddam needed to be disarmed because of the threat posed by his alleged biological and chemical weapons. It was his crimes against humanity that justified the dictator’s overthrow. Acknowledging that there were good grounds for being skeptical about the motives of the US for invading Iraq, Hari is nevertheless certain that Iraq is an immeasurably better place without Saddam Hussein. He exhorted the audience to consider the many opinion polls indicating that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis were thankful for his removal and anxious for the invasion to succeed. What baffles him is the attitude of the British left. Hari had always thought that it was the job of the left to show solidarity with oppressed peoples everywhere. Why then was there not more left-wing concern about the prospects of emergent Iraqi trades unionism?

The contrast between the views of Hari and Joyce and those of Fisk and Charles Glass was stark. Speaking with barely suppressed anger, Fisk said he was not altogether sure if his original reservations about the war had been vindicated. For he had never imagined that the British and American governments were capable of lying so shamelessly or that the occupation would be so “flawed and brutal”. He reserved a special contempt for the notion that Blair and Bush were latter-day counterparts of Churchill and Roosevelt (a claim recently made in the Observer by the noted British historian, Martin Gilbert.) The truth was that the Iraq war had culminated in disaster, with the most densely populated areas of the country completely outside of government control. Clearly unimpressed by Hari’s claim that opinion polls showed how much Iraqis supported the invasion, Fisk reported that he constantly met people who, despite the hatred they felt for Saddam, longed for the security they enjoyed under his regime. The coming elections, he maintained, would be every bit as unrepresentative as those that took place under the old regime; many Sunnis — whether as the result of intimidation or disaffection — would not be voting. He could not emphasize sufficiently the terrifyingly lawless state into which Iraq had been plunged. The Iraqi people’s true war of liberation, he declared, was only just beginning: it would be a war to liberate themselves from their unwanted occupiers.

Charles Glass recalled a meeting in London before the war began at which the British peace campaigner Bruce Kent accurately predicted that US President George W Bush’s doctrine of unilateralism would prove a recipe for anarchy. What was now all too apparent was that Bush’s cure for Iraq was worse than the disease. Invoking the dubious record of American foreign interventions, he reminded the audience that the US had been backing oppressive regimes for the past fifty years. It was hardly surprising if many Iraqis took fright when the US announced that it was coming to liberate them. If anything, Glass was even more pessimistic about the prospects for Iraq (and for the Middle East in general) than Robert Fisk. He fears that, having put down key strategic bases in Iraq, the US is set to remain in the country for many years and could ultimately be responsible for as many as two million deaths.

The debate concluded with a heated question-and-answer session. One member of the audience, a notably strident opponent of the war, very nearly had to be placed under physical restraint. Not unexpectedly, the relationship between Israel and the US figured large in the exchanges, with Fisk making trenchant comments on the subject. He did not demur at the suggestion that Israel was “at the heart of US foreign policy” but confessed he would have no objection to this if only US stewardship of the Middle East were “genuinely neutral”. There would be no hope of peace until it was.

What gave him a measure of hope was that attitudes among the US Jewish community were changing. On American lecture tours, Fisk has found a new disposition on the part of American Jews to question US/Israeli policy in the Middle East.

Within the next few months a general election will take place in Britain. It will soon become clear how far British people in general share the outrage over the Iraq war that found such passionate expression at Church House last week."

Millions of Iraqis will risk their lives this Sunday to go to the polling booths and vote. Here in Britain, half of us couldn't even be bothered to stroll up the road in perfect safety at the 2001 election - so have we reacted with awe and admiration for Iraqis? Not quite. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times, speaks for much of conservative England when he jeers that "Iraqi democracy will merely serve as a transition to Shia theocracy, Iran-style." In this newspaper, Robert Fisk speaks for much of progressive opinion when he discusses "the Arab inability to seize democracy", declaring that "Arabs have confidence only in their tribes."

The Iraqis who die voting this week - and some of them will - will not die for nothing. For the first time, every single Iraqi will be free to vote - and 80 per cent of them want to, according to the latest polls. No political parties are banned except the Baath - so anybody and everybody is running for office.

And the idea they will vote for a theocracy has been conclusively proven wrong. The main Shia parties declared this week that there will be no clerics in government - not as prime minister, nor even as minister for paperclips. "There will be no turbans in the government. Everybody agrees on that. Iraqis do not want a theocracy. We want democracy," explained Aadnan Ali. He is the leader of the Dawa Party, and he was speaking on behalf of the entire Shia electoral list.

Nobody should doubt that Iraqis are capable of democracy. The real question is: will they be allowed to exercise it? It is one thing for an election to be held, and another for the popular will to be translated into action. There are two major forces converging on Iraq who seek to destroy meaningful democracy and negate the will of Iraqis: Islamic fundamentalists and market fundamentalists. The first will try to prevent the elections; the second will simply ignore them.

The jihadist "resistance" has made its position clear. Musab al-Zarqawi - blessed by Osama bin Laden as his man in Baghdad - declared this week, "Those who vote are infidels. We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it." He jeers that the Shia are "lurking snakes" and "crafty scorpions" and "the most evil of mankind." This ‘resistance’ wants to create a fascist-Taliban state in Iraq where music is banned, women are jailed in their own homes and their own burquas and the Shia are second-class citizens in their own country again. The only nation ever governed by such jihadists is Afghanistan - and it may never recover.

But another philosophy - not as bad, but still disastrous and anti-democratic - is being imposed on Iraq right now: market fundamentalism. This is a far more extreme and vicious social system than the capitalism practised in Britain or the US. For over two decades, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been thrusting on poor nations a system where all government restrictions on corporations - universal healthcare, significant levels of taxation and spending, moves to tackle unemployment - are seen as "burdens"and ruthlessly stripped away. This approach has reduced several countries to riots, hunger and even revolution. They have brought disaster to countries as diverse as Russia, Argentina, Thailand and Bolivia.

A deal levered in Paris last month by the US and other countries guaranteed that the elected Iraqi government will not be able to escape this market fundamentalism. The Western governments agreed to cancel 80 per cent of the odious debts Iraq has inherited from Saddam Hussein - on one condition. Iraq's economy must be controlled by the IMF for the next decade.

So the elected Iraqi government will have to battle the Zarqawi jihadists with its hands tied. It will be unable, for example, to do anything about the cause of much of the instability: unemployment. After two years of IMF economic "management", Iraq now has 70 per cent unemployment - just as Argentina and Russia did under IMF rule. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate in economics, warned back in June 2003 that the IMF's plans would have precisely this effect - but he was ignored. If there had been this kind of wild and unrestrained marketization in post-war Germany or Japan, the legacy of fascism would never have been flushed out. Even in Britain - a country with a fairly robust democratic tradition - we would have mass civil unrest and rising fascist movements if most of us were unemployed.

An effective anti-insurgency policy would be multi-pronged. It is impossible to hunt down and kill every insurgent (didn't Fallujah teach us that?). The best way to wear down the insurency is to simultaneously target their ringmasters like Zarquawi and to gradually undermine its pool of support through policies to revive the economy and increase employment. The best remedy is not fear but hope. Yet this is precisely what the IMF conditions prevent the elected Iraqi government from offering. All the economic tools to tackle the insurgents have been taken away; they will be left with nothing but raw force, which aggravate the situation in most instances.

That's why these two fundamentalisms ravaging Iraq cannot be considered in isolation. Market fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism reinforce one another: jihadists feed on the extreme marketisation of the IMF. Mass unemployment provides a recruiting ground for maniacal death-cults like Zarqawi's. Mass unemployment provides a recruiting ground for maniacal death-cults like Zarquawi’s. Amy Chua, a Professor at Yale University, has shown how in her award winning book ‘World on Fire’ how this happens, explaining that "the IMF model has been shown to inflame situations in dozens of countries and breed extremist movements."

Yet somewhere - beyond these twinned bankrupt ideologies, and beyond Baathism - are the Iraqi people, eager to express their desire for democracy. How can we ensure they prevail? The pre-emptive sneering at the elections is not the way to do it. If you dismiss the elections, you dismiss 80 per cent of the Iraqi people. No: the better option is to watch the elections closely and lobby to ensure that its results are respected.

Some opponents have argued that voting will legitimise the on-going occupation. Precisely the opposite is the truth. The mainstream Shia parties will almost certainly demand a timetable for the withdrawal of coalition troops from Iraq if they win. They know that foreign troops blundering and torturing their way across an unemployed country will only breed more resistance. They know that only a strategy involving trained Iraqi troops, accountable to an elected government, will ever have a hope of catching the Sunni fundamentalists. So if your main aim is to ensure an end to the occupation - a process most Iraqis now want, according to opinion polls - then you should back the elections and the victors.

Of course we cannot trust the Bush administration (or, sadly, the Blair government) to respect the election results, given their anti-democratic behaviour in several parts of the world. I don't believe there will be any rigging of the vote itself, because it would be too blatant and would cause scandals even in the US. Instead, pressure will be brought to bear in the weeks following the election, when the elected parties come together to choose a prime minister. The US will no doubt lobby hard for a candidate friendly to its oil and business interests. This will be the time for protests and jeering, not as Iraqis gaze on posters saying "You vote, you die."

But the withdrawal of coalition troops - at the request of an elected Iraqi government - is only one part of the fight to make sure the democratic will of Iraqis is respected. Physical occupation can end while economic occupation through the IMF continues. Those of us in Britain who want to see real Iraqi democracy must battle to reform the IMF and other anti-democratic international bodies, and for a real, no-conditions cancellation of Iraq's debt.

The Iraqi people are about to risk their lives to show the world how much they want real democracy. It will be a savage trick if, after that, it is still denied to them.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article can also be sent to letters@independent.co.uk

POST-POSTSCRIPT: There's an intelligent and sensitive partial response to this article at http://modies.blogspot.com/2005/01/confessions-of-pro-war-skeptic.html

There have been a couple of responses to my piece about the murder of trade unionist Hadi Saleh in the left-wing press.

The Morning Star – which can actually be quite an interesting read, despite my obvious disagreements with it – published the following editorial:

"No excuse for killing
(Monday 10 January 2005)
THE latest mistargeting of a US precision-guided 500lb bomb to the wrong address in Mosul and its consequent slaughter of 14 civilians, including nine children, should serve to remind people of the reality behind Washington's supposed democratisation mission in Iraq.

And it will be interesting to see if this bloodshed merits a mention from the mouthpieces of "democratic imperialism" in the bourgeois media.

Pro-war journalists Johann Hari of The Independent and Nick Cohen of The Observer were not particularly perturbed by the transformation of Fallujah from a town of 300,000 people into a scarcely populated rubble by pacifying US air power.

However, they both drew attention in their columns to last week's barbaric murder of Iraqi trade union leader Hadi Saleh.
But both writers used their pieces to berate left-wing anti-war campaigners, especially the Stop the War Coalition, for failing to speak out against such murders and even of encouraging "the kidnappers and torturers of the Ba'ath Party and al-Qaida."

To make their case, they trotted out the same old disinformation and lies.

Hari repeated the false claim that the StWC advocates "any means necessary" by Iraqis resisting the US occupation.

He also implied that the StWC was involved in the howling down of Iraqi trade unionist Subhi al-Mashadani at the European Social Forum in London, when, in fact, StWC convener Lindsey German opposed the ultra-left disruption and demanded a fair heading from Mr Mashadani.
Cohen states that UNISON and some Labour MPs walked out of the StWC in response to the anti-war movement "putting the lives of Iraqi trade unionists at risk."

In fact, neither the union nor any MP has left the StWC.

He also claimed that the Saleh murder had been "scarcely" reported, which simply illustrates the narrowness of his own reading, since it was the main story - Murdered for helping Iraqi workers - on page six of the
Morning Star on January 7.

Cohen even invented a new conspiracy, excoriating the BBC for never having covered "the story of the totalitarian nature of the leaders of the anti-war movement."
Presumably this is because, at the onset of the war, then BBC boss Greg Dyke ordered a blanket ban on covering "anti-war extremists" and it's difficult exposing people at the same time as burying them from public view.

Supporters of embattled Iraqi trade unionists will surely steer clear of identifying with media bloodsuckers on the corpse of Hadi Saleh who use any opportunity to discredit opponents of the imperialist invasion and occupation, especially the StWC.

The position, moved by NATFHE and agreed unanimously at the TUC last September, was and remains valid.

It urged "speedy withdrawal of the coalition forces" and "supported the new independent trade union movement as an essential force in the creation of a secular, democratic Iraq."
There is no contradiction between these positions, which should both be backed firmly by Britain's labour movement."

I find it extraordinary how quickly these people accuse me of lies, without naming a single one. I won’t respond in kind by accusing the writer of this piece of lying, but he or she is obviously a pretty sloppy or inaccurate reader. As anyone can see if they read the piece, I did not “berate left-wing anti-war campaigners” as a general group. The whole point of the piece was to point out that many left-wing antiwar campaigners like Peter Tatchell and Harry Barnes explictly condemn the trade union-murdering ‘resistance’. My article was a call for the entire left to join them (and the small sliver of left-wing opinion who sided with the majority of Iraqis and backed the overthrow of Saddam) so we can support the Iraqi trade unions with hard cash and solidarity. I’m not interested in stoking sectarian inter-left battles; I genuinely hope the entire left can set aside our disagreements over the invasion and back the most democratic force within Iraq with all our energies.

They claim that I have argued the anti-war protests encouraged al Quaida and the Ba’ath Party. I have never said that, and never would.

They say, “He also implied that the StWC was involved in the howling down of Iraqi trade unionist Subhi al-Mashadani at the European Social Forum in London, when, in fact, StWC convener Lindsey German opposed the ultra-left disruption and demanded a fair heading from Mr Mashadani. “

I have spoken to three people who were in the hall. They say that the people disrupting the meeting were known to them to be from the SWP. I do not know what Lindsay German did – that’s why I didn’t mention her.

The Morning Star has said nothing – not a word – to justify their libellous description of me as spreading “disinformation and lies”. Their description of me as a “media bloodsucker [feeding] on the corpse of Hadi Saleh” says more about them than about me and Nick.

I have printed their statement in full; will they print my response in full?

An organisation called Socialist Unity has responded similarly, in another libellous article entitled ‘Johann Hari's struggle with truth’ by somebody called Andy Newman.

He writes [with my comments in square brackets]:

“The tragic murder of Hadi Salih, the international secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), has been exploited by pro-war columnist Johann Hari to sow divisions in the peace and Labour movements. Writing in the Independent on 7th January Hari asks where are the voices of condemnation of this murder by the international left?
http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=544

The date of Hari's article is revealing, as Hadi Salih was murdered during the night of 4th January and news did not break until the 5th, and indeed the significance of the event was only slowly spreading around. Given that most left publications are weekly or monthly it was of course easy for Johann Hari to find little response only two days after the atrocity. [Many left-wing sites update every day, as he well knows.]

Many on the left may be surprised at Johann Hari's sudden interest in trade unionists being murdered. He has consistently advocated Western military intervention as a force for good, human rights and democracy. He castigates the left for being tardy in our response to the murder of Salih, but we could counter that he has never commented on Columbia, a country where US military intervention is directly linked to the death squads, and the murder of trade unionists.
[This is simply factually wrong. Please look in my archive. I have written about the horrors unfolding in Colombia repeatedly. I have also defended trade union issues repeatedly; browse through the ‘British Politics’ section and you’ll find that I have consistently supported the British trade union movement. One of my first articles for the New Statesman was about supporting trade union campaigns to bankrupt the World Bank and I have been rock-solid in defending trade unions ever since. To suggest that I have suddenly become interested in trade unions now – as Newman clearly implies – is a statement that can only be made out of ignorance or worse.]

He now expresses concern over our response to the murder of Hadi Salih, when he has advocated and praised the invasion of Iraq that led to 100000 other deaths.

However, the question that Johann Hari asks has also been echoed by figures in the labour movement whose integrity and motives are not in question.

In order to address these concerns it is necessary to firstly dispose of a number of falsehoods and sleights of hand that Johann Hari indulges himself with.

The most important inaccuracy by Hari is the claim that the Stop the War Coalition issued a statement supporting struggle against the occupation be "any means necessary", this claim was repeated in an Observer article on 9th January by another pro-war "liberal", Nick Cohen. And the allegation appears yet again in the "Open Letter to the leaders of the Stop the war Coalition" being circulated by Labour Friends of Iraq.
No such statement was issued.

[This is untrue. It was e-mailed out in October 2004, with the note, “The attached statement is to be issued on Monday by the Coalition in response to the pressing political questions for the anti-war movement which have arisen from the Labour Party conference. It has been endorsed by the officers and will of course be on the agenda for discussion at the Steering Committee meeting to be held later this month. Kind regards, Andrew Murray and Lindsey German.” It was due to be discussed after it was issued – as indeed it was. This gives us some idea of its status, and the fact that it was indeed openly distributed.]

I understand that these words were in the original draft of a statement from the StWC about the IFTU's intervention in Labour conference. However these words were apparently removed at the request of Ken Smith the Socialist party representative on the steering committee during an e-mail consultation before it was formally issued. http://www.stopwar.org.uk/article.asp?id=111004

[This is wrong. It was withdrawn after there was a great deal of fuss, a resignation and articles in the news sections of the Indie and the Guardian.]

In any event, "by any means necessary" is not that objectionable a phrase is it? [The actually phrase StWC used was a commitment to support the resistance “by whatever means they find necessary” – a fact which renders much of what follows nonsensical]. Malcolm X pointed out that "by any Means Necessary" does not mean doing anything you want: it means doing just as much as is necessary. It would surely be ridiculous to support the insurgency but call on them to refrain from doing what was necessary to win? Indeed supporting the right of the insurgency to use any means necessary also involves an implied limitation that there is no support for violence that is unnecessary or counterproductive.

[Er, they in fact said they would support whatever means the resistance found necessary, which is a very different matter. If I say to Charles Manson he can use “whatever means he finds necessary” to deal with people, I am obviously lending support to him should he kill people. As Peter Tatchell has pointed out, the StWC statement plainly means support for the targetting of innocent civilians.]

However, Johann Hari goes further and misrepresents the reason why Mick Rix resigned from the StWC steering committee. Hari says: "The Stop the War Coalition passed a resolution recently saying the resistance should use "any means necessary" - which prompted Mick Rix, a decent trade unionist, to resign from the STWC on the grounds that this clearly constituted support for the murder of civilians. "

In actual fact the reason given by Mick Rix was:
"I wish to resign my position on the steering committee. There are two reasons, one I am not able to make the meetings due to work pressures, secondly I do not agree with assertions made over the conduct of union delegations at the Labour party in the recent statement, and indeed the attacks made on Abdullah. I think in these difficult times, the recent outbursts that have been made, and the personalisation has vastly reduced our influence and support, in the movement. I thought it would have been better and more democratic, before these statements were made, they should have been discussed, and wider views sought."

http://www.labourfriendsofiraq.org.uk/archives/000063.html

[Actually, he has spoken on the radio more than once offering a more expansive reason for why he quit. He made it clear he found the statement abhorrent. Newman seems to be assuming – bizarrely – that this one statement is all Rix has ever said on the matter.]

Now, I personally thought it was unnecessary for the StWC to issue a statement on the IFTU at all, and moved a motion at the next national council saying it was a mistake and calling on Mick Rix to be invited to rejoin the steering committee. Tony Woodley's article in the Morning Star was in my view more appropriate. After all if we are to have a united anti-war movement then it has to embrace the differing views within the Labour movement over the IFTU, and indeed over the ICP's limited involvement in the Allawi government. Nevertheless, this is a legitimate debate amongst comrades, and Johann Hari seems to be deliberately seeking to exploit nuances of disagreement to undermine the anti-war movement.

[In fact, I have explained my motives above. It is strange that they assume the most base and conspiratorial motives are at play. I don’t assume that about them; I assume they mean what they say, even when they do so sloppily.]

At the November National Council meeting of the Stop the War Coalition 50 delegates from local Stop the War groups broadly approved the handling of the situation by the steering committee and the officers of the coalition after an informed debate.

It is also surely inaccurate for Hari to claim that the left has made no condemnation of the murder, for example US Labour Against War issued a fine statement. (http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=7428) "The ultimate source of violence in Iraq is the US occupation. The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions calls for the end of the occupation and the US war. Salih's murder does not bring this end one step closer. " And there have been condemnations from unions around the world, including the British TUC, NATFHE and RMT.

[Again, Newman is blatantly misrepresenting my position. Far from saying that “the left has made no condemnation of the murder”, my exact words were, “Some of the most honourable and consistent left-wing opponents of the war have already spoken out about this [murder].” Go look at it. His statement is precisely the opposite of the truth. I would include the US Labour Against the War statement in this latter category – and I gave two lengthy quotes from opponents of the war who condemned the murder. Has Newman actually read what I said?]

I also think there is a sleight of hand by Hari in quoting George Galloway speaking before the murder, and describing the IFTU as Quislings, and thereby implying some affinity with the assassins. [I don’t accept this; go and look at the context. It’s easy to infer Galloway was speaking before the death, although I concede I could have made that even clearer and said, ‘Speaking last week…’.]

The context of Galloway's remarks was the unprecedented intervention of an IFTU representative, Abdullah Muhsin, to sway the vote on Iraq at the 2004 Labour Party Conference. Galloway is renowned for his colourful turns of phrase [like ‘Sir, I salute your courage, your strength an your indefatigability’], and he did indeed write a controversial article in response for the Morning Star, but in the traditions of the left and of that paper, there was debate about it; and indeed the Morning Star also published an interview with IFTU activists, (expanded version at http://www.socialistunitynetwork.co.uk/news/iftureps.htm) and an interview with Salam Ali of the Iraqi Communist party describing why the ICP feels it is tactically advantageous to participate in Iraq's interim government. There is an on-going debate in the peace and labour movements about the IFTU, and it is quite possible to hold very different views on this matter and still unconditionally oppose the occupation of Iraq. [Precisely my point. I state this myself in the article. How does that rebut my argument?]

In any event, George Galloway's views are simply the views of one individual member of the Stop the War Coalition, and being a coalition it is recognised he does not speak for everyone. [Where do I imply otherwise?]

Johann Hari also seeks to link by implication the murder of Hadi Salih to the treatment of Subdhi al-Mashadani at the ESF, where the IFTU representative was heckled off the stage. Of course there is no causal link: the armed insurgents in Iraq do not take their lead from ultra-leftist protesters in Britain. [Where do I allege there is a causal link? It’s an absurd allegation; nobody reading my piece could possibly have thought that assassins in Iraq take their cue from the ESF. I was commenting on a much wider question about solidarity – I defy any intelligent person to read my piece fail to see this.] Hari also makes a sleight of hand by implying that a majority of the ESF audience jeered al-Mashadani, when surely [‘surely’? I spoke to three people who were there; Newman has clearly spoken to nobody] it was only a tiny minority, and the only organised current in the British left who supported the disruption of that meeting was the minuscule sect, Workers Power.

Unfortunately Johann Hari's article is being widely circulated, it is therefore certainly worth noting that Andrew Murray, the chair of the Stop the war Coalition wrote the following response in a letter to the Independent: "Johann Hari falsifies the position of the Stop the War Coalition [this libel is not backed up with any facts at all] in relation to the recent brutal murder of Hadi Salih. We condemn this killing and its perpetrators, whoever they are. The Coalition has never adopted a resolution or issued a statement as outlined by Mr Hari, and we have repeatedly denounced the murder of civilians. Also, we did our best to ensure that the Iraqi trade union speaker invited to the European Social Forum was able to be heard, and publicly criticised those who disrupted his meeting. We differ from Hari in two respects. Firstly, we condemn all civilian deaths in Iraq, including those tens of thousands which are the responsibility of the occupying forces he supports. And we recognise the right of Iraqis to resist that unlawful occupation, which is at the root of violence in Iraq and is the consequence of the war which Hari promoted."

However, even once the slurs [what slurs?] by Johann Hari have been disposed of, it is necessary to recognise that the differences of opinion that he is seeking to antagonise are real ones. There are two strands of disagreement, firstly as to the nature of the resistance, and secondly the nature of the IFTU, and those other parts of the Iraqi labour movement who do not support the armed insurgency.

There clearly is a huge wave of insurgency in Iraq that has widespread popular support, but it is a very multi stranded phenomenon [as I have said in, oh, about ten different columns; I explained why I was pretty sympathetic to the Shia uprising], and not only do some of those fighting have Ba'athist or Theocratic aspirations, more importantly the tactics being adopted by some parts of the insurgency are to disrupt reconstruction, murder workers and increase the misery of the Iraqi people, and are therefore an obstacle towards any favourable outcome. There was an interesting article in "al Ahram" (Egypt) that said the Iraqi resistance had directly killed around 3000 civilians at a time where Iraq Body Count had the number killed by occupation forces as 8000 - Both estimates were using the same method of reporting recorded deaths in the press. The Lancet article quoting 100000 dead (plausible, but inconclusive) makes no distinction between deaths directly resulting from the occupation forces, those caused by the insurgents, and those caused by the breakdown of the security situation (primarily the responsibility of the occupation forces, but murdering the police is a deliberate tactic by insurgents to increase the security vacuum). Therefore although the resistance is broadly popular, at this stage it still seems to be inchoate and instinctive, rather than a directed military campaign with clear objectives. [Yes. I have made precisely the same points; how is this a rebuttal of me?]

Certainly there have been deplorable murders of ordinary workers and trade unionists. According to US Labor Against War: "IFTU members and rank-and-file workers have been murdered and kidnapped as they tried to carry out normal union activity, or simply do their jobs. On November 3, four railroad workers were killed, and their bodies mutilated. On December 25, two other train drivers were kidnapped, and five other workers beaten. On the night of December 26, the building of the Transport and Communications Workers in central Baghdad was shelled." However, it must be recognised that there is no collective strategy behind the insurgency, and these murders are not necessarily endorsed by all, or even a majority, of those who take up arms against the occupation forces. The strategy of that part of the insurgency who seek to disrupt Iraqi civil society in order to prevent the occupation from normalising its rule inevitably but incidentally targets workers. The importance of this is that although some parts of the resistance may be hostile to trade unionism, it would be a mistake to characterise the insurgency as animated by a systematic opposition to the Labour movement. The insurgency is not fascist [having said the insurgency is complex and multifaceted, he now blithely generalises about it as if it was a cohesive movement. Newman is guilty of precisely the sin he falsely accuses me of], even if there are elements within it historically associated with the suppression of trade unions. [historically associated? Like, a year-and-a-half ago…]

Boston University Professor. Assaf Khoury, a member of the editorial team at Occupation Watch has remarked on this as follows: "...It is most unlikely that Salih was killed by 'fascist Saddam loyalists' as the IFTU is claiming. Much of the armed resistance is carried out by an assortment of unemployed city and small town people, politically marginalized groups, often using religion to find an ideological context, some of them disabused ICP people who had been suppressed by the Baathists.... I think we should condemn the targetting of all trade unionists, many of whom are not in the IFTU or have broken with it (I can't give you statistics or firm evidence on this, but there are many anecdotal stories that point to this)."

So although Salih was an IFTU official it is probable, according to Sami Ramadani, that he was murdered not for his trade unionism but rather because of his association with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), who are regarded as targets by some due to their participation in the Allawi government. "Mr Salih's murder, and that of another ICP leader few weeks ago, were widely reported in Iraq and seen as part of a campaign against "collaborationists." Hardly any in the Iraqi media, both pro and anti occupation, paid much attention to his role as an organiser of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU)."

As Professor Khoury writes: "I think the ICP lost its bearings completely since the early 1990's. ... The ICP is now riven with dissent, factionalism, and debilitating internal struggles. The official leadership of the ICP has two ministerial posts in the Allawi government, one very minor and one of average importance, while the big posts (defense, foreign affairs, interior) are occupied by representatives of the pre-occupation exile groups or the two pro-US Kurdish parties. The ICP people inside the Allawi government are targets of the resistance, just as much as other members of the government. But there are ICP factions against the government, one of them called the "ICP-cadre wing (or faction)" which is vociferously attacking the US, Allawi and the rest. To confuse things even more, the ICP-cadre faction refuses to split and considers itself the "'legitimate' ICP. There are other communist/leftist groups around, such as the Workers Communist Party of Iraq. Because the ICP has been historically rooted in the labor unions of the large cities (Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, etc.), with really dominant positions in them at one time, they still have a very strong presence among labor organizers (not much heard of in the US corporate media) who are of course paralyzed by the internal factionalism or utterly confused. "

Now it is clear, that despite the politics of some of the leading figures in the IFTU, this is a genuine trade union body, although admittedly not the only genuine trade union body in Iraq. [I pointed this out too. I said the IFTU is “one of 12 trade union organisations formed in Iraq over the past two years”. Again, he’s not contradicting me, although he seems to think he is. I an only assume he simply can’t remember what he has just read.] As RMT activist Alex Gordon has written: "It would be difficult to imagine how a 'perfect' democratic trade union movement could possibly emerge overnight from three and a half decades of dictatorship, war and now foreign occupation and fascist [sic] terror. The critical demand that has to be made on any Iraqi government is whether they will ratify International Labour Organisation Conventions concerning the right of workers to form and join trade unions of their choice and the right to take strike .... The IFTU has consistently made this demand and has pursued it consistently in discussions with the ILO and the Iraqi Interim Government."

What is more, many Iraqi socialists express the concern that an immediate victory for the insurgency (as it is currently constituted) would, in the words of Salam Ali of the ICP see "the return to power of those who are supporters of the previous regime and also extremist groups, Islamic or otherwise, who have other agendas - either the return of dictatorship or religious dictatorship - and have nothing to do with the real liberation of Iraq."

The position of the ICP, and therefore of the IFTU that the occupation should be ended under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1546 (elections in January 2005, troops out by June 2005 unless authorised to stay by an elected Iraqi government), is not irrational, and is a legitimate opinion to pursue within the labour movement. However it is wrong and dangerous.

It is wrong because it sows illusions that the election process will be allowed any sort of independence from the aims and objectives of the US government. What is more, there will be no simple outcome in Iraq, and the occupation forces are not going to just leave. The process of driving them out is at an early stage, and the insurgency will change its character in the course of the struggle, which makes the task of the Iraqi labour movement of raising their own demands all the more important.

It is dangerous because although the ICP nominally supports military actions against the occupation forces, as Salam Ali describes: "when attacks are targeted against US forces specifically, people have no problem with that - no political organisation, including those who have been accused as collaborators, condemns attacks on the occupying military forces.", the murder of Hadi Salih shows that the ICP participation in the government has tarred the trade union movement with the implication that they are collaborators with the US occupation forces. To build independent trade unions it is necessary to distance workers' organisations from the US occupation. [Surely that is for individual trade unionists on the ground in Iraq to decide for themselves? If they want to work within the structure of the new elections, great. If they don’t, great. It’s not for Westerners top tell them what to do; it’s for us to show solidarity with them as they make decisions in a horrific situation.]

It is quite correct that the anti war movement stays focused on its main aim of opposing the occupation and calling for the withdrawal from Iraq by US and UK troops. We must recognise that there is a diversity of opinion within our movement, and we should beware those like Johann Hari who seek to turn diversity into division.”

That’s where it ends. So where is the evidence of my ‘struggle with truth’? Is there a single error pointed out in this critique?

Instead of writing this contradictory piece, Newman could have been supporting and fundraising for the Iraqi trade unions. Go to www.tuc.org.uk/ international for details about what the real left is doing to help the Iraqis.

When he was 21 years old, Hadi Salih was seized from his home in Baghdad by Saddam Hussein's secret police and summarily sentenced to death. His crime? Forming a trade union and campaigning for decent wages and basic health and safety conditions.

Amazingly, Salih survived. After five years in an Iraqi dungeon, his death sentence was commuted to permanant exile. He never gave up campaigning against Baathism and - although he opposed the recent war because of the civilian casualties it would cause - he headed home the moment Saddam was toppled.

Salih quickly became the leading figure in the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), one of 12 trade union organisations formed in Iraq over the past two years. He knew that no society has needed trade unions more than Iraq does right now. Trade unions are a secular space where it doesn't matter if you are Sunni, Shia or Christian; they provide an opportunity to bridge sectarian divides and unite in a common democratic cause. Even more importantly, trade unions are the only way for Iraqis to resist the IMF programme of "shock therapy" and corporate rule being imposed undemocratically (with the support of the British and US governments) on their country.

Speaking a few months ago, Salih expressed his hope that trade unions could play the same role in regenerating Iraq that they played in post-war Japan. "The labour movement in Japan has been fighting for their country and for social justice for 50 years. If they can do it, we can too. That is why, despite everything, I am enthusiastic." He had already recruited over 300,000 members.

On Tuesday night, a masked gang broke into Salih's home in Baghdad. They bound him hand and foot and they blindfolded him. They beat and they burned his flesh. Once they had finished torturing him, they strangled him with an electric cord. As a final touch, they riddled his body with bullets.

Salih's close friend Abdullah Muhsin, the international representative of the IFTU, told me yesterday, "He was an ordinary but a very decent man. He worked in the print industry in Iraq and in exile, and the passion of his life was Iraqi workers and their desire to live as free people. And now I hear people describe his murderers as 'the resistance'. Resistance to what? To trade unions? To a decent man who loved his family and loved Iraq and wanted his country to be free? They cannot silence Salih. They cannot silence the Iraqi trade unions. Not again."

The IFTU has reported a pattern of attacks on trade union offices and trade union members. The murder of Salih bears all the hallmarks of Saddam's Mukhabarat - the Baathist KGB. Whatever you thought about the justice of the recent war in Iraq - and there were plenty of good reasons to oppose it - the only decent path now is to stand with a majority of Iraqis against the murderers of Salih and dozens of other Iraqi trade unionists.

Yet - I can't believe I'm saying this - a significant portion of the left is not standing with them. John Pilger - who says he has "seldom felt as safe in any country" as when he visited Saddam's Iraq - now openly supports the resistance on the grounds that "we can't afford to be choosy". The Stop the War Coalition passed a resolution recently saying the resistance should use "any means necessary" - which prompted Mick Rix, a decent trade unionist, to resign from the STWC on the grounds that this clearly constituted support for the murder of civilians. George Galloway has attacked the IFTU as "quislings" and described the tearful descriptions of one of their members of life under Saddam as "a party trick".

A few months ago, Subdhi al-Mashadani, a representative of the IFTU, came to speak at the European Social Forum in London. This is a really important gathering of left-wing campaign groups who fight on issues nobody else in the political spectrum stands up for: defending refugees, opposing the sale of weapons to tyrants, ending the international drug patenting rules that are killing hundreds of thousands of Africans, and much more. So you would expect the international left to welcome him and hear him politely.

But he was an Iraqi who didn't restrict his comments to the need for occupation troops to leave once a democratic election has been held. He also insisted on talking about the nature of the Sunni "resistance" - one of the most reactionary political forces anywhere on earth, consisting of homicidal misogynists, homophobes and supporters of Sharia law. The audience at the Social Forum booed and hissed him so loudly that he had to leave the stage.

I know that right now the international left is a relatively small force, and it might seem odd to dedicate valuable space to the direction of this movement when much more powerful forces are ravaging Iraq. But I believe that, in the long term, a campaigning left is the only force that offers real hope on some of the biggest issues confronting the world: man-made climate change, nuclear weapons, extending worker's rights and meaningful democracy, and reforming the disastrous IMF and World Bank, to name just a few. If this force is hijacked by the likes of Galloway and those who vilify trade unionists emerging from the rubble of a tyranny, then there really is no hope at all.

Some of the most honourable and consistent left-wing opponents of the war have already spoken out about this. Peter Tatchell, for example, explains: "Sections of progressive opinion are wavering in their defence of universal human rights. Many leftists now support a 'resistance' that would bring to power Baathists and Islamic fundamentalists. Is that what the left should stand for? Neo-fascism, so long as it is anti-western?"

The Labour MP Harry Barnes knew Salih. He told me yesterday: "This brutal murder is a wake-up call for any on the left who still have illusions about the 'resistance'. It was one thing to oppose the war, as I did on every occasion in the Commons - but we have moved beyond that debate. We may not like how we have got here but those on the left who do not give urgent and increased solidarity to the Iraqi trade unions will be damned by history."

It is time for this decent left to reassert itself. The situation in Iraq is extremely volatile, and even small political shifts can have a large impact right now. For example, the (mostly peaceful) Shia rebellion managed to bring the elections forward. A strong trade union movement could help to make the result of that election meaningful.

And there is something practical that everybody who cares about Iraqis can do about it. The TUC has set up an online donation service for the Iraqi Trade Unions at www.tuc.org.uk/ international. If just 5 per cent of the people who marched against the war supported the Iraqi labour movement now with their wallets, we could strengthen the hands of Iraqi democrats at a turning point in their country's history.

This isn't about supporting the occupying forces. It's about supporting ordinary Iraqis trying to get beyond Saddam and beyond the occupation. Do it for the Iraqi people. Do it for Hadi Salih.

NOTE: Comments on this article can also be sent to letters@independent.co.uk if you want them to be considered for publication in the paper.

POSTSCRIPT: There's a critical response to this article at http://apostatewindbag.blogspot.com/2005/01/on-hadi-salih-or-how-johann-and-nick.html

and another at
http://pssstka.blogspot.com/2005/01/stwc-are-right-well-partially-at-least.html

I received this e-mail today:

"Hi Johann,

I recently read an article by George Monbiot which I think makes an
interesting point. This point should, I feel, be addressed by those
who claim that the Iraq "intervention" was for the good of Iraqis. I
believe you hold this view, even in the face of the current best guess
that around 100,000 civilians have died as a result. I've included an
excerpt from Monbiot's article:-

----snip----
The figures for war and aid are worth comparing because, when all the
other excuses for the invasion of Iraq were stripped away, both
governments explained that it was being waged for the good of the
Iraqis. Let us, for a moment, take this claim at face value. Let us
suppose that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had nothing to do
with power, domestic politics or oil, but were, in fact, components of
a monumental aid programme. And let us, with reckless generosity,
assume that more people in Iraq have gained as a result of this aid
programme than lost.

To justify the war, even under these wildly unsafe assumptions, George
Bush and Tony Blair would have to show that the money they spent was a
cost-efficient means of relieving human suffering. As it was
sufficient to have made a measurable improvement in the lives of all
the 2.8 billion people living in absolute poverty, and as there are
only 25 million people in Iraq, this is simply not possible. Even if
you ignore every other issue - such as the trifling matter of mass
killing - the opportunity costs of the Iraq war categorise it as a
humanitarian disaster. Indeed, such calculations suggest that, on cost
grounds alone, a humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms.
----snip----

I can forward the full article to you if you've not seen it elsewhere.
I received it from Znet (www.zmag.org) but I think it might only be
available to subscribers.

Your position is (AFAIK) that we bombed and invaded Iraq for the good
of Iraqis and that you have gone to all reasonable lengths to assure
yourself that this is what they wanted. I'm sure from your writing
that you also accept that the billions living in abject poverty and
dying of curable diseases would like us to help them (help in the
traditional sense, rather than the "bombing them" sense). Do you
disagree with Monbiot's analysis that the billions spent on the
massive military operation could have done more to alleviate human
suffering elsewhere? Or do you justify the lavish expense we went to
in bombing them another way?

I found Monbiot's article particularly interesting because it makes a
case which you must still answer even given your insistence that the
invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq is somehow morally
justifiable and good for Iraqis... premises with which I disagree,
along with the huge majority of people on this planet.

I hope that you are able to take the time to respond.

Regards,

Mat"

Since I've received quite a lot of mail like this, I thought I'd post my reply:

"Hi Matt - thanks for e-mailing.

You've misunderstood my position quite a lot. (probably because I haven't written it clearly enough).

I do not think the US and Britain "invaded Iraq for the good of its people". That would be a transparently ridiculous belief. The notion that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney sit around agaonising about how to help Iraqis is insane.

As I wrote throughout th conflict, I think the US and Britain invaded Iraq for their own reasons of statecraft, to do with asserting raw power, securing oil supplies and (possibly) trying to turn around the culture of tyranny in the Middle East.

My position was that - presented unfortunately with the limited choice of an US-UK invasion vs Saddam forever - a majority of Iraqis preferred the risks of invasion (terrible as they were and are). It is for progressives to support a tyrannised people, while trying to build a world where the choices are far better than this.

My belief about the opinions of Iraqis - gained through visiting Iraq and meeting as many Iraqi exiles as possible, as well as studying the limited polling available - turned out to be correct: look at the opinion polls.

However, given that the UK-Us states are not benign and not motivated to seek the good of Iraqis (to say the least), it is contingent on anybody who cares about Iraq to keep siding with Iraqis. That's why I've kept arguing for a swift election (which the polling shows Iraqis want), and end to occupation, and a strong Iraqi trade union movement.

If I thought most Iraqis had opposed the war, I would have sided with them. they didn't. I don't regret supporting them; I am still trying to do it now.

Does that clarify it a bit?

Thanks for e-mailing,

Johann"

So Tony Blair finally made it to Baghdad. None of us who supported the war imagined it would happen like this: a year-and-a-half after the fall of Saddam, the Prime Minister flew in secret to Baghdad's tiny and imperilled "safe zone". In his press conference, he talked about his feelings of "humility", and admitted: "You can feel the sense of danger people live with every day".

How did a prime minister used to being fêted after military action - remember the cheering crowds in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Kabul? - end up scrambling around Iraq in fear?

A great deal has been written about the failure of military strategy in Iraq. Even in the timid, 'balanced' American media, Donald Rumsfeld’s disastrous decision to fight the war on the cheap has been exposed. The Defence Secretary provided far too few troops to secure Iraq’s borders or basic civilian infrastructure, and for the ugliest of reasons: George Bush wanted to save the money so he could dole out massive tax cuts for American millionaires. Rumsfeld has been reduced to petulantly snapping at his own troops, and Bush has resorted to defending him - in irrelevant and imbecile terms - as having "a good heart".

But an even more important reason for the failure of the occupation has barely been discussed: the coalition's economic strategy. Following the Second World War, the Allied forces understood that fascism arose in conditions of unemployment, poverty and desperation. That's why there was a massive effort to reflate the German economy; by early 1947, unemployment was down to 10 per cent. In Iraq today, unemployment stands at an incredible 60 per cent. For young Sunni men - the main recruiting pool for the insurgency - it has soared to 80 per cent. This is a recipe for rage and rebellion.

It would be bad enough if the coalition had simply done nothing to reflate and re-energise the Iraqi economy. Incredibly, the truth is even worse: they have imposed on Iraq a programme of ultra-neoliberal reforms that have brought economic collapse to every country they have been inflicted upon. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist and dissident former chief economist at the World Bank, describes the economic policies of the coalition as "a proven and predictable catastrophe". They imposed a form of capitalism more extreme than anything tried in a democratic country: immediate privatisation of almost all services (without any debate), non-competitive contracts, and a 15 per cent flat tax. This is not democracy. It is market fundamentalism.

Nobody should be surprised this has created chaos. It has all been tried before. In post-communist Russia, the "shock therapy" now being forced on Iraqis was such a catastrophe that life expectancy actually fell below the dismal levels of late Soviet communism. The resulting economic anarchy and corporate looting made the Russian people lose faith in democracy and turn to the incipient fascism of Vladimir Putin.

The same policies - often formulated by the same economists - have created vast Iraqi slums stuffed with disaffected young men with nothing to do. Tony Blair spoke yesterday about how important it is for Iraqi democracy to succeed - "for the security not just of the region but of Britain and the world". He's right. A democracy at the heart of the Arab world would be a massive blow against both Islamic fundamentalism and secular tyranny. But the economic model spread by the US and British governments - and their proxy, the IMF - cannot bring democracy. Indeed, it has been proven repeatedly to spread unemployment, disaffection and the hollowing out of meaningful self-government.

When Blair talks movingly about Iraq's brave election monitors, risking their lives to set up polling booths, he cannot simply leave out economic issues. Meaningful democracy means the freedom to set economic policy - and Iraq's capacity to do this has just been locked in a dark and undemocratic cage. Last month, the rich nations of the world - including Britain - agreed to cancel 80 per cent of the blood-soaked debt racked up by Saddam Hussein. Sounds like good news? Ah, but there was a condition. The next Iraqi government - whatever the Iraqi people say at the polls - will have to agree to allow the Iraqi economy to be run by the IMF for the next decade. That's right - the same IMF that, to quote Stiglitz again, "brought disaster to Russia and Argentina and leaves a trail of devastated developing economies in its wake".

Some readers might remember I supported the invasion of Iraq, despite my terrible fears about the Bush administration. This was because - after visiting Iraq and studying the limited surveys of Iraqi opinion available before the invasion - I knew a majority of Iraqis would rather take their chances with an Anglo-American occupation than with the rule of Saddam and his sons forever. That turned out to be true: just look at the Iraqi opinion polls.

But that creates a massive obligation to keep siding with the Iraqi people afterwards. If you support an invasion - and the slaughter of 100,000 people - because you believe you are siding with Iraqis, then you had damn well better keep supporting them. I think left-wing people should try to find out what the Iraqi majority wants and stick with them: against Saddam and against the Sunni insurgency, as Blair argues. But also - crucially - against the IMF-ing of their economy, and for real democracy. Blair won't go there.

You can only understand why the IMF belongs in this triumvirate if you look at the human stories behind the economic jargon. Stiglitz - after working with the IMF for nearly a decade - explained that the fund consists of remote bankers "almost entirely ignorant of the countries they are creating policy for. They do not ask themselves, in meetings, what a country's democratically elected politicians say, much less ordinary people. They simply impose whatever policies best serve the interests of large multinational corporations". This usually means the sacking of tens of thousands of desperately needed nurses and teachers and racking up unemployment. They aren't sadists; they are blinded by neoliberal economics, which sees no difference between what massive businesses require and the needs of real, flesh-and-blood people.

The IMF agenda being imposed on Iraq over the next decade - irrespective of what Iraqis say at the polls - will have a warping effect on the country's politics. Iraqi politicians will not be able to argue about schools, hospitals or taxation, the bread-and-butter of politics in every successful democracy. No; those decisions will be taken by the IMF in Washington. So what will happen? The political vacuum will almost certainly be filled by tribal resentment and religious disputes - it's all that is left. This pattern has been established in Kosovo, where IMF economic rule over the past five years had led to a resurgence of sectarian disputes and far-right tribalism.

So when Tony Blair spoke yesterday about this being a simple fight between "democrats and terrorists", I feel stirred but manipulated. He's right that the Sunni fundamentalists blowing up election offices and Shia children must be defeated if there is to be any hope of a decent Iraq. But the IMF-dominated Allawi-land he is offering Iraqis - while somewhat better - is not democracy and it is not freedom.

Given a choice between Saddam and Blair-Bush, I think I supported the better side. But it's become clear over the past 18 months what a lousy choice that was. It's up to all of us now to slowly, carefully, try to create a world where there can be far better options and the possibility of real democracy. There's only one super-power that can create that: it's called global public opinion. It's only when we understand the world we live in - without illusions - that we can build real alternatives. I can feel a new year's resolution coming on ...

This weekend, I received an e-mail from a British Iraqi called Abdul. "You wrote this week about the snobbery facing 'chavs' in Britain. Hmm ... I don't think the underclass of this country are under threat of mass aerial bombardment, detention of all males under 45, their ghettoes facing the prospects of being razed to the ground, etc. On the other hand, the town where my mother originates from (Fallujah), is facing total and utter destruction. 'For its own good,' mind."

He continued: "Mum's lost all contact with her parents (both in their late seventies ... and never members of the evil Baath Party) who, we assume, are still trapped in Fallujah. An uncle from Baghdad set off a couple of days ago to try to locate them. My granddad has very advanced motor neurone disease and isn't particularly mobile. I guess we may as well do the janaza [funeral prayer] for them now. You're free to write whatever you want Johann. I just think that seeing as you were one of the loudest 'liberal-hawk' cheerleaders for invading Iraq, it would be nice to read a few words about the impending massacre that's gonna happen in Mum's home town ... one of the fruits of your agitation for war."

I began to write a response - from the safety of my nice cosy flat - when the news came through that the military assault on Fallujah had begun. No matter what I wrote in my reply to Abdul, I couldn't shake off the memory of that American who ended up declaring during the Vietnam War: "We must destroy the village in order to save the village." Am I saying we must destroy Fallujah in order to save Fallujah? Is that the liberal-hawk position now? Have we sunk so far, so fast?

Tony Blair, Christopher Hitchens and most other liberal hawks have a firm answer to this anxiety. Look, they say, there are two forces at work here. On one side, you have a town - Fallujah - seized by Sunni militants who rally to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They speak only for the alienated 20 per cent of the Iraqi population who cannot bear the fact that the "stupid" and "dirty" Shia are about to assume power in a free election. They have imposed sharia law and Sunni supremacy within Fallujah; they bind women in burqas and stone them if they dare to walk the streets unveiled. They stand for the most barbaric and extreme of fundamentalisms and - in their clear public statements - dismiss democracy as a form of prostitution. On the other side, you have the US and Britain who - however imperfectly - are trying to hold a free and open election in just three months. How can anybody who believes in democracy throw up their hands and declare themselves neutral between them?

I can feel the force of this argument - and then I try to tell it to Abdul. Your grandparents are in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the 100,000 other Iraqis who have died. They are casualties in a war that will ultimately save lives. If Fallujah is not reclaimed - if a pocket of Sunni resistance is allowed to continue forever sabotaging and attacking Iraq's police and hospitals and any hope of democracy - far more people like your grandparents will die in the long term. (And, of course, if there had been no war at all - if Saddam and sanctions and Uday and Qusay had been left in place - at least half a million people like your grandparents would have carried on dying year on year on year forever into an eternal Baathist sunset).

I can't quite persuade myself of this. I turn to my Iraqi friends who run the Iraqi Prospect Organisation (IPO) - a campaign group of British-based Iraqi democrats who are in constant contact with their Iraqi friends and relatives - for answers. Yasser Alaskary has just returned from the country. As Iraqis, the IPO have a degree of access denied to even the best foreign correspondents.

"When explaining Iraq to British people, you have to distinguish between the Shia and Sunni resistances," he explains. He has a lot of sympathy for the Shia resistance. "I've talked to the young guys who are leading it, and the foot soldiers too," he says. "They are angry about the unemployment and the electricity and the drains and just the daily pain of occupation, which has been handled abysmally by the Bush administration. The Shia resistance want a democratic election and then for the Americans to go home. They want Iraq to succeed. That's why we totally opposed firing on Najaf. They should have negotiated from the beginning.

"Now the Shia have been reassured by Sistani and the occupiers that the elections will be open and fair, Muqtada al-Sadr and the rest of the Shia resistance have agreed to hand over their arms and stand for office," he continues. "Negotiations worked; there was no need for the senseless violence we saw there. It's an amazing development. The Shia are looking to the elections now. The roots for democracy are growing on the Shia side - and that's 60 per cent of the people."

The Sunni resistance is, however, a different story. "I was there in Fallujah earlier this year. It doesn't look like Iraq; it looks like Taliban Afghanistan. I didn't see a woman's face the whole time I was there. They are all hidden behind those dehumanising shrouds." The resistance fighters he met there believed in either Sunni supremacy or endless jihad. "It wasn't surprising. You only have to look at who they are killing to find out their philosophy. They don't want democracy and peaceful co-existence. If there was any way to negotiate with them, I'd support it. But how can you talk people like this down from their ledge? What can you offer them?"

Yasser then offers two crucial facts. First, there hasn't been a single Shia suicide bomber in Iraq so far. That tells you something about who is trying to destroy security and why. Second, there have been just three weeks this year when there were no suicide bombs in Iraq. They were the three weeks the US forces had Fallujah surrounded. Doesn't that suggest it is the base of the Sunni resistance? Doesn't that suggest it is right to deprive them of their base by force if necessary?

And yet, and yet ... Yasser adds that the Bush administration remains incompetent to the point of callousness in applying this strategy. "Why haven't they set up refugee camps arund the city? They should have asked the Red Cross in. Instead, you have families camping out in the desert or even homeless. It's not acceptable." And, he might have added, depleted uranium is being used in Fallujah. there is a strong chance it wll cause an epidemic of cancers (among both the US soldiers and Iraqi civilians) for decades to come.

And, for me, there's another proviso. I backed this war because I believed most Iraqis would rather take their chances with an American occupation for a while than with Saddam and his sons forever. (This turned out to be right, unless you think that every Iraqi opinion poll has been mysteriously and inexplicably wrong). This makes it essential to keep siding with a majority of Iraqis on these basic issues. So do Iraqis want US troops to go into the Sunni stronghold now or not? Yasser suspects so, but the opinion polls aren't clear on this point. They show that Iraqis desperately want nationwide elections - something which cannot happen if Fallujah remains in anti-democratic hands. Yet they also show that most Iraqis want the coalition troops out of Iraq now, so how can they want them to extend their mission to a new and enraged city?

In the absence of a clear Iraqi majority to side with, it is tempting to break the rules of the Columnists' Trade Union and confess uncertainty. I cannot see any way to hold an election unless Fallujah is reclaimed; Zarqawi is not going to agree to set up polling booths any time soon. Yet it is possible that crashing into Fallujah will enrage Sunnis across Iraq and fuel dozens of other smaller insurgencies. We just don't know. The incursion into Fallujah is - in truth - a massive, bloody risk. So how do I tell Abdul that his grandparents might be about to die for a gamble?

Please support the Iraqi Prospect Organisation - and do what you can for Iraqi democracy - at www.iprospect.org.uk

While the world is watching Najaf bleed and burn, the future of Iraq will pivot on what happens in a private hospital bed 3,200 miles away. The story of a frail 74-year-old man undergoing a triple heart bypass operation in London might seem a sideshow while US troops and Muqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army are turning an Iraqi city into a live arms dump. But that old man is Ali al-Sistani, a grand ayatollah - and he is Iraq's best hope for democracy.

A democratic ayatollah? At first, the idea sounds preposterous, like a black Ku Klux Klansman, a Jewish Nazi or an intellectual member of the Bush family. The Ayatollah Khomeini is still the West's mental template, a tyrannical theocrat who slaughtered more than a million Iranians and issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

But democratic instincts spring up in the strangest of places. Many Shias insisted that Khomeini was an anomaly, a radical departure from the millennium-old Shia tradition of "quietist" clerics who did not seek personal political power. I was always pretty sceptical, and I'm instinctively hostile to religious authorities - but the behaviour of Sistani since the fall of Saddam has proved them right. From his home in Najaf, Sistani has been an absolutely consistent campaigner for a free and democratic Iraq, while scrupulously avoiding any temptation to seek power for himself.

Still sceptical? I know I was. True, Sistani had a reputation for speaking out for Shia rights during Saddam's tyranny, bravely inserting coded warnings to the dictator into his sermons. But when Saddam's dictatorship was finally destroyed and Sistani began to call for democracy, I assumed this was simply a cynical ploy. Surely an ayatollah could only want one man, one vote, for five minutes? Wasn't Sistani hoping for the election of a theocratic government that would quickly find excuses to liquidate a free press and hold rigged semi-elections thereafter?

But then Sistani pulled off a democratic triple whammy. He reached out to Iraq's Sunnis and Christians, and called on the Shia to protect them from both the Coalition and from al-Qa'ida attacks. He told the Americans they could not hand-pick delegates to Iraq's constitutional assembly; they must be chosen by "a full and free vote". And then his many religious texts began to be translated into English - and it became clear that in the civil war within the Muslim world, Sistani is clearly in the moderate, democratic camp.

Read his book A Code of Practice For Muslims in the West. It is - in Muslim terms - a startlingly progressive text. Sistani stresses the importance of respecting democracy, arguing that Muslims should participate in electoral politics - as voters and candidates - on an equal basis with non-Muslims. This might sound like a platitude, but compare it with the message preached across the Arab world by Islamofascist groups like al-Muhajaroun, who argue, "Muslims must not vote for anyone in elections... It is idol-worship. There is no legislator but Allah, and the only law should be Sharia".

Before the war, some of us argued that, in a Saddam-free Iraq, democratic strains of Islamic thought would begin to emerge. We were right - but the violence has been so terrible that nobody noticed. Reuel Marc Gerecht, an expert in Shia political thought, says that Sistani's philosophical arguments for democracy are "almost unprecedented in their scope. He speaks the language of inalienable rights: one man, one vote, and a constitution written by elected representatives and approved by popular referendum. Sistani has managed to launch a project that Muslim progressives have only ever dreamed of: establishing a democratic political order sanctioned and even protected by the clergy." Here are the slow, tentative roots of the Islamic Reformation so badly needed in the Middle East.

Islamic fundamentalism will not ultimately be defeated by a crusading West. No; moderate Muslims are the key - and Sistani is probably the most influential moderate Muslim alive today.

Of course, he has views on social issues that, to a Western leftie, are (at best) distasteful. He is critical of divorce and he certainly isn't going to be joining any Gay Pride parades. But he believes in opening up a democratic space in which these ideas can be discussed, and he believes in abiding by the decision of the majority. This is a massive advance.

Still some people suspect Sistani is a closet theocrat whose democratic arguments will quickly melt when he is close to power. Why then has he repeatedly and blatantly rejected the Iranian political model, where Mullahs "oversee" (read: censor and control) the democratic parliament and press? He could have single-handedly placed the Mullahs at the heart of the debate about Iraq's constitution; instead he has insisted they remain outside state structures, in the democratic forum.

There were many honourable critics of the war on the left, and some of their arguments have been vindicated. But there was a conservative critique of the war - based on the belief that Iraqis would seek another dictator as soon as Saddam was gone - that has been proved totally wrong. For example, Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times, declared that "only a fool" could believe Iraqis were capable of democracy. "Democracy will merely serve as a transition to Shia theocracy, Iran-style, while Sunnis and Kurds break loose." The incredible popularity of Sistani's arguments for democracy - and the massive explosion in membership of democratic trade unions across Iraq - shows how pernicious this view is.

It is no coincidence that the cease-fire between the Coalition and the Mehdi Army has broken down while Sistani has been incapacitated. He has proved to be a crucial restraining force on both Sadr and the Coalition. He tried to direct the Mehdi Army's (often legitimate) anger about unemployment and human rights abuses away from violent protest and towards democratic organisation. He could have played an important role in restraining the increasingly disturbing behaviour of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who has just reintroduced the death penalty and banned al-Jazeera - the most vigorous example of a free media in the region - from Iraq for a month.

The only response to this increasing authoritarianism and rage is to make a clear case for Sistani-style moderate democracy. It's always tempting to reduce politics to force, to guns, to raw power. As we see terrible footage of fighting from Najaf over the next few days, the temptation will be almost unbearable. But politics is ultimately about ideas. Even so psychopathic a wielder of power as Joseph Stalin once admitted "ideas are more powerful than guns".

The idea of democracy is breathing and kicking and fighting in Iraq, and it needs to be defended against anyone - from Muqtada Sadr to George Bush - who might find it inconvenient.

Supporters of freedom in Iraq like me now find themselves in the strange position of desperately hoping for an ayatollah to survive. If he dies before his political philosophy has won Iraq's battle of ideas, his arguments should outlive him. But I fear they may be drowned out by the sound of gunfire.

Noam Chomsky writes on his website this week, "For what it's worth, polls in Iraq reveal very considerable and apparently growing support for withdrawal of the US occupying army, apart from the Kurdish regions."

Hurrah! Chomsky has noticed that Iraqis actually have opinions. Okay, so he only mentions them when they concur with his own, but it's a start. Now Noam, look again at the opinion polls you cite. Don't they - er - show that a majority of Iraqis wanted the invasion to proceed? Why do you advocate siding with the Iraqis only now, and not when they were tyrannised and even more desperate than they are today?

Oh, and you mention that the Kurds want the US to stay. If the military bases you have written about as the real reason for the war were based there, would you accept that this was democratic? You wrote well and bravely about the abuse of Kurds in Turkey in the 1990s, which continues (to a thankfully lesser extent) today.

What do you recommend for the Kurdish regions of Iraq? Make it clear. Do you support the plain wishes of a majority of Iraq's Kurds? Your fan-base will be appalled if you do; is that why you don't mention it?

One regular reader asked a good question apropos of my latest column, about some other criminals who Bush should hand over for trial. (I contentrate on Union Carbide's CEO at the time of the Bhopal catatrophe, and Oliver North for his role in the Central American charnel house in the 1980s).

The correspondent wrote:

"Johann, this latest article is really very good. The analysis is
accurate. Thanks. I want to ask you a question, but without any heat in it. I do not understand your thinking vis-a-vis this government and Reagan's.

This administration had approached or secured Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Poindexter, Elliot Abrams, Negroponte, Libby, Cheney and several other criminally-minded hatchet men from the Reagan or Nixon era.

Isn't the provenance of an administration one you would look at before
committing yourself to supporting an illegal war? Surely Bush (or Cheney) had made it clear through his administration choices that his intentions were similar or identical to Reagan and also Nixon?"

I replied: "Hi Mike - thanks for your e-mail. I totally understand your point and I've agonised over this question for the past year. I think the left and progressives should have campaigned for what Iraqis wanted and still want: an invasion and then the construction of a democratic and free Iraq.

Did Bush want this? No, not substantially - but nor did Saddam. We had to choose between the best of these two bad options, given that - as David Aaronovitch has said - the Nelson Mandela Peace Corps was not available to invade Iraq. Following a US invasion we were always far more likely to get closer to Iraqi democracy (see next January's elections, free trade unions, the democracy built in the North of the country over the past decade etc) than if we had left Saddam in place (the only real alternative to the war).

Crucially, that isn't just my view - it's the judgement call of the Iraqi people, as all the opinion polls have shown and the Iraqi Crisis Group survey showed before the war. And that's where the break with Reagan and his massacres in Central America comes. A majority of Nicaraguans wanted the Sandinistas to remain in power. They did not want the Contras to decimate their country. (We know this becuase of the free elections the Sandinistas held - a luxury that the US-backed dictator Somoza denied Nicaraguans through his long reign). Surely it is possible to find a political position that supports the majority of Nicaraguans who didn't want a US intervention and the majority of Iraqis who did?

Of course it would be better if we were not constrained to these limited choices. It would be better if we did have other forces who could intervene to overthrow the worst dictatorships - that's why I support a UN Anti-Genocide Army and the structures of global governance discussed by george Monbiot. We need to work for these long-term alternatives.

But given that we were where we were in 2004, on balance I don't regret siding with the Iraqi people in support of for the lesser evil."

[All reader feedback is very welcome at johannhari at yahoo dot co dot uk]

Back in February 2003, an Iraqi asylum-seeker living in Glasgow started e-mailing me, explaining his reasons for supporting the war. Over the past few weeks, my replies to him have been permeated by my hopeless, sullen mood. He has always been polite, even when we disagree strongly. But then last week, he snapped: "You can afford to despair. You aren't in Baghdad. You aren't in Basra. What do I say to my family [if I took your position]? Well thanks a lot for your support. The rest of us will keep on fighting for Iraqi democracy without you."

He's right. How can we despair while a terrorised country fights for democracy? There are two main forms of pessimism spreading through British opinion like dry rot. I can understand (and share) one of those fears: that the US has no intention of promoting democracy in Iraq. But many people - mostly on the right - have begun to declare that Iraqis themselves do not want democracy for their country. Last week a Tory MP said casually to me: "Iraqis don't want to vote. They want to visit Mecca and chop off their neighbours' hands."

I hear this argument every day, not just from cab drivers. Peter Hitchens has typically asked: "You think [Iraq] can be turned into a democracy? Don't be so silly. This semi-medieval society, with its inbred clans and all-powerful imams, does not want to be like Britain or America. As I have said from the start, Iraq will end up with a new dictator."

You can only believe this if you ignore several key facts. Northern Iraq has been a thriving democracy for more than a decade now, and it is no less "tribal" than the rest of the country. The population has more PhDs than any other country in the region except Israel, and the fifth of the Iraqi population exiled by Saddam - now returning - bring with them remarkable wealth and knowledge of democratic societies. In poll after poll, Iraqis have said they want their country to be democratic; more people chose the American political system as the one they wanted to imitate than Saudi Arabia's. Fewer than 5 per cent want an Iranian-style theocracy.

Indeed, it is extraordinary how many Iraqis developed a belief in democracy through the Saddam years. The apparently genuine democratic philos- ophy of Ayatollah Ali Sistani - who has consistently lobbied for a representative and elected government - is one of the great unexpected bonuses of the post-war period. Can it be that Iraq's Thomas Jefferson is an ayatollah?

But at least the shrugging Tories who dismiss Iraqi democracy as a joke are being honest. They freely admit they aren't too bothered about the Iraqi people. They put the British state interest (or their narrow interpretation of it) first, second and third. What's the excuse of the progressives, who purport to care about people irrespective of their nationality or race?

One friend of mine who campaigns for a Palestinian state and votes Green recently confessed: "I hope Iraq remains in chaos. It's more important that Bush loses the election and Blair is ditched than that Iraq goes right." Much of the left has simply written off Iraqi democracy in this way, seeing it as a proxy for other political fights. Yet inside Iraq, it is trade unions - usually seen as allies of the left - who are emerging as bulwarks of a peaceful, stable Iraq, just as they did in post- war Europe.

Here is a small illustration: two months ago Moqtada Sadr, the de facto leader of the Shia uprising, was leading his Army of Mehdi towards Nasiriyah . They stumbled across an aluminium plant and ordered the staff to evacuate, but the workers would not leave. Their trade union, the Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq, issued a statement saying their workers "refuse to evacuate their workplaces and turn them into battlefields".

The union rejected "the two poles of terrorism in Iraq" - the armed militias and the occupying forces - and insisted on a transition to a democratic Iraq. Here we have ordinary Iraqis refusing to allow yet another war to disrupt their lives, and they are greeted with total silence from progressive Brits.

Why aren't British trade unions doing far more to back their Iraqi comrades, who have been gassed and butchered for decades but can now organise freely? Where is the solidarity in Britain for terrified Iraqis trying at last to build a democracy? For most British people, marching to stop the war - the war that removed Saddam - has been the limit of their contribution to the Iraqi cause. Where are they now? Why are so few British people even now pressuring their government to act in line with Iraqi opinion?

It might seem tiresome to bring up the Iraqi opinion polls yet again, but we have no better way to find out about Iraqi feelings. The Iraqi people have been remarkably consistent in explaining what they want. Ever since the fall of Saddam, most Iraqis have told pollsters they wanted the invasion to happen, and they wanted it to be followed by a brief occupation lasting between six months and a year. This provided plenty of time for a democratic, representative Iraqi government to be elected; a similar timetable was followed in Eastern Europe after Communism. That year is up. Now they want us out.

The nonchalance with which so many people even today dismiss Iraqi opinion - when it offers us the best solution to the mess we're in - is so odd it should be dubbed Gulf War Syndrome Mark II. The symptoms are easy to diagnose: you blithely assume you know what the majority of Iraqis think, and block your ears whenever somebody offers some evidence of what they really believe. The anti-war movement suffered from it first, ignoring all the evidence that most Iraqis desperately wanted the war to proceed. Now the carry-on-with-the-occupation-despite-the-opposition-of-most-Iraqis crowd are infected.

Please listen to what Iraqis are actually saying at last. In two weeks there will be a largely cosmetic handover of power to an unelected government; there is a danger that we will treat this puppet body as a genuinely representative body and listen even less to the polls.

The message from real Iraqis is nuanced. They do not regret supporting the invasion - just 3 per cent want Saddam back. But the occupation has gone on too long and been too vicious. Ninety two per cent of Iraqis now see the US troops as occupiers rather than liberators.

After the torture in Abu Graib prison and the appalling decision to fire at holy shrines in Najaf, we will never get Iraqi opinion back behind the occupation. The Iraqis who want the troops to stay until a legitimate Iraqi government is elected still outnumber the Iraqis who want the troops out immediately - just, but both sides want the transition within months.

If you support the Iraqi people, don't just wring your hands. Give money to the trade unions at www.iraqitradeunions.org. Pressure our government to bring forward the Iraqi elections to August at the absolute latest - and then to follow the wishes of Iraq's new democratic government. This requires scrapping the too-slow UN hand-over plan. Even more, true democracy would demand that the US give up the neocon plans for permanent military bases in Iraq and the International Monetary Fund's plans for a privatised, hollowed-out Iraqi economy that would make meaningful self-rule impossible.

As my Iraqi correspondent writes: "We need to keep our eye on the prize: democracy for a people beaten up by Baathism for 30 years."

I forced myself to take a few days off from Iraq to clear my thoughts.

I've returned to mountains of e-mails in response to Friday's column. I wanted to respond to two points that have recurred time and again.

The most conspicuous - as readers of Harry's Place will keenly understand - is the 'So, you admit the anti-war people were right all along?' gloating. As one reader put it: "Your position is now identical to the anti-war movement's."

Hello? The anti-war position had one uniting idea: it was better to leave Saddam in place than overthrow him. (No, the vast majority didn't support Saddam etc etc - but if we had listened to them he would undoubtably still be in power).

I am totally opposed to that idea. Even if the US interest in Iraq only overlapped as part of a passing coincidence with the will of Iraqis, it was better to exploit that coincidence to get rid of a genocidal monster than not. My position remains diametcially opposed to the anti-war brigade.

The second point is a more complex one. The view it is responding to has best been expressed by Harry here. He explains, "My solidarity is not with ‘the Iraqis’ and it never has been. My solidarity is with Iraqi and Kurdish democrats and it is clear at the moment who their main enemy is." I have a huge amount of sympathy for this, but I fear it contains a logical flaw. How can we side with Iraqi democrats and not the majority of Iraqi people? If a majority of Iraqis want the US out in two months (and god knows, I hope they don't, but it seems to be the case), then how can we be democratic and oppose such a fundamental desire from a mjority of people?

If we defy the majority in the name of democracy, what kind of Iraq will the democrats eventually inherit? Won't it be even more radicalised and angry? Won't the democrats - rightly - look out of touch and be deposed swiftly?

I don't have a fully-formed view on this and I'm eager to hear from everyone.

(Oh, and on a point we'll all agree with - has anyone read the monster Galloway's new book, 'I'm Not the Only One'? It's absolutely staggering in the degree of Saddam apologism on display, and goes far beyond even the monster's previous statements. Full review in the Indie on Friday.)

A GI with a lacerating grin and empty eyes drags a collapsed, naked Iraqi on a leash like a dog. A cellophane-and-ice-packed Iraqi corpse with a broken nose and blank expression lies on a slab. "So this is the freedom and democracy you have been cheer-leading for," an anti-war friend says, as she waves the pictures in my direction.

Part of me wants to explain that under Saddam, torturers were rewarded, promoted, venerated. At least these torturers will be shamed and punished. But it feels like a hollow, debased excuse. It's not as though overthrowing Saddam gives the allies a certain amount of moral credit in the bank for it to draw on. They can't do everything short of gassing the Kurds, all the while protesting that - hey! - we're not as bad as Saddam. Every fresh human rights abuse - from the day of the liberation on - is unnecessary and savage.

And these pictures are only a small part of the story. I wish they were the result of negligible "rogue elements" within the US army, a bad night- shift in Abu Ghraib. They are not. Amnesty International said yesterday, "Our extensive research in Iraq suggests that this is not an isolated incident... [We have] received frequent reports of torture or other ill- treatment by coalition forces during the past year. Detainees have reported being routinely subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during arrest and detention ... Virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill-treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities."

"So," my friend said, "are you finally prepared to admit you were naive to think we can ride the beast of US power for human rights ends?" Back in 2002, when an invasion first loomed, we were looking at a three-piece jigsaw - Iraq, Britain and America - and I still think I judged two of the pieces right. On Iraq, it was correct to say two things that ran against the received wisdom of the anti-war majority. There would be no "peace" for Iraqis with Saddam left in power, and a majority of Iraqis wanted the invasion to proceed. (Even Hayder Sabbar Abd, the torture victim who has spoken out over the past few days, wanted the invasion to proceed.)

On Britain, it was right to say that Blair was motivated partly by a genuine desire to help Iraqis, despite his nonsense about WMD. Look at his 1999 intervention in Sierra Leone to see his sincere - and accurate - belief that sometimes military power can be used for humanitarian ends.

But I misjudged - badly, terribly, offensively - the biggest piece: the Bush administration. What I should have realised was that there was a passing coincidence between the interests of Iraqis and the interests of US state power. Nothing more. It was right to exploit that coincidence to get rid of Saddam; however bad things are today, the Iraqi future looks better now than if Saddam was still in power and Uday and Qusay were lined up to take over. But I implied that the Americans were doing this, in large part, for humanitarian reasons. That was wrong.

To see George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as the praetorian guard of Amnesty International - as American propaganda would like us to believe - is lunacy. They arm, fund and support some hideous dictatorships. For example, several recent books have extensively documented the relationship between the House of Saud - one of the most stinking tyrannies on earth - and the House of Bush, reaching back for decades. If they were motivated primarily (or even incidentally) to spread human rights, their policies towards - to name a few - Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, the IMF and Venezuela would be very different.

Any humanitarian gain as a result of the invasion of Iraq was - in the US-held territories - a collateral benefit. The US government mounted this invasion for geo-strategic reasons of its own. It may be that one of those reasons was to burst the bubble of tyranny in the Middle East that they have created and fostered for more than 50 years - not because they have had a Damascene conversion, but because it backfired horribly on 11 September. But that has yet to be proven. The interests of Iraqis and the US government converged for a moment. I always said that when they parted, we should keep siding with Iraqis. That parting has now happened: a majority (57 per cent) of Iraqis in the latest poll want - for the first time - the US troops to leave within two months. If the left-wingers who backed the war for human rights reasons do not now side with the Iraqis, then all the accusations against us - that we were simply shallow apologists for US power - will be vindicated.

So where do we go from here? Bush has the power to stop the torture immediately. The solution is not for the President to warble barely coherent semi-apologies to Arab reporters. It is to address the US troops and private contractors directly. He should say: "This is your Commander-in-Chief. I am going to give you a binding order. If you think you are being told by your superiors to commit acts of torture, ignore them. Disobey. I am your ultimate boss, and I am telling you now - torture is not the policy of the US Army. If you are caught breaking this rule - and you will be - you won't just be sacked from the army. You will be jailed for a very, very long time."

Anything less than this should be mocked as insincere, incomplete or incompetent. But to say it, Bush would have to decide that the dubious benefits the US accrues from using semi-torture, extra-judicial detentions and deliberate "heavy handedness" are far outweighed by the damage to America's reputation when these techniques are exposed. This is a clear political choice.

The best long-term solution - as ever - lies with backing a majority of the Iraqi people. They wanted the invasion and, for a year, they wanted the troops to stay. (I am using the opinion polls here. Do you have a better way to find out what Iraqis want?) Now Iraqi opinion has turned in favour of an imminent withdrawal. If the Americans had done as many of us urged and opted for elections on 30 June, their clear will could have been realised.

It's not too late: a constitution and election could still be organised quite quickly. Sure, international troops might still be needed to protect a democratic Iraq from being overthrown by internal totalitarians - but that is a judgement call for a democratic Iraqi government.

Of course what the Bush administration anticipated was that it would establish a neat client state in Iraq that would provide a steady supply of oil and a location for US bases in the region. It needs to admit now that it is engaged in damage limitation. The situation in Iraq has not and will not unfold as Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz anticipated.

Iraq cannot wait until January for an election, as the United States proposes. Nine months of ruling a population that no longer wants the allied forces there - including a long, hot summer - will be disastrous. They must set a date for elections - full, free, open elections - very soon. Give up on the hope of US bases, and bank on a democratic Iraqi government trading its oil. The allies have a choice now between a democratic withdrawal and quagmire. If there are more photos of KKK-style humiliations and frozen corpses - with no end to the occupation within months - then Iraq will burn.

I just received this e-mail:

Dear Johann Hari, now that most Iraqis want the coalition gone, and given your opinion-poll-driven rationale for the West remaining as occupiers, do you now support the removal of coalition troops in accordance with Iraqi wishes?

kindly

David Bracewell

I replied:

Hi David - thanks for your e-mail.

Since you are citing the opinion polls, I assume you
now accept that a clear majority of Iraqis wanted the
invasion to proceed? If they had been free to march on
the day of the big anti-war demo, they would have
marched against the anti-war movement and in favour of the war. You can't only side the opinion polls when
they suit your own purposes.

For that very reason, it would be insane and totally
inconsistent if I sided with them then and not now. If
the opinion polls find a consistent pattern saying
Iraqis want a withdrawal within two months - which is
the CNN definition of "immediately" - then I will back
them, on the grounds that the occupation will clearly
have failed. (Only 15% wanted immediate withdrawal in
the most recent BBC poll, so the evidence is currently
mixed: there will be more polls in the coming weeks,
so let's keep a close eye on them.)

I talked yesterday in my Indie column about how
catastrophically the Americans are misjudging the Shia
resistance, and pointed out that "most Iraqis... want
the transition to proceed pretty damn fast, and they
want it handled much better than at the moment." This
is consistent with all the polls, although the CNN
poll underlines it more clearly than most.

Thanks again for e-mailing and I'll be interested to
hear if your reading of the polls is consistent,

Johann

All comments welcome...

Saddam Hussein could only ever have been dealt with by force. There was no way he was going to give up or moderate his tyrannical power except at the barrel of a gun. The Saddamist-Sunni insurgents - who are systematically targeting Shia civilians - can similarly only be dealt with by force. There is no way their agenda of restoring Sunni supremacy over the Shia majority can be haggled over by the coalition authorities.

But force is emphatically not the way to deal with the Shia insurgents. Now that the Americans are withdrawing from the rubble of Sunni-dominated Fallujah and handing the city over to Iraqi troops, it seems they are revving up for a repeat performance in the Shia holy city of Najaf. Muqtada Sadr is armed and waiting in one of the city's mosques with his ramshackle Mahdi army. The signs are now clear: Paul Bremer, the American administrator of Iraq, has demanded that Muqtada dissolve his army and hand himself over to the Iraqi judiciary. If Sadr refuses, his tinpot militia will be met with a firestorm of US force, and Najaf, like Fallujah, will burn.

The Americans are strutting into this disaster because they have badly misunderstood the nature of the Shia resistance. Muqtada Sadr is being inflated into the United States' Villain of the Week, a mini-Bin Laden bent on destroying America and poisoning slices of apple pie. Sadr's rhetoric plays to this perception: he has described Bush as "the father of all evil", and proclaimed he stands alongside Hamas and Hizbollah. Yet below the bluster, is there an absolutist who can only be dealt with by bombs and guns?

Muqtada owes his high profile to the widespread love and respect among Iraqis for his father, Mohammed Sadr. His Friday prayers attracted hundreds of thousands of worshippers when he began to make subtle political demands on behalf of the Shia population for greater religious and political freedom. This kind of behaviour was not tolerated under Saddam. He was murdered in 1999.

Mohammed Sadr was not a fundamentalist. He vehemently opposed the Iranian system of rule by the ayatollahs, describing it as "completely wrong". The Iranian ayatollahs labelled him - preposterously - as "Saddam's puppet", and accused him of syphoning off Shia anger and quelling its revolutionary rage. He defended religious pluralism, and, while his political agenda could not be publicly expressed, he seems to have believed broadly in democracy.

When Saddam's regime was belatedly destroyed, Muqtada emerged as a fairly moderate voice. He called for "peaceful resistance" to the occupation, and went on al-Jazeera to condemn violence against coalition troops. He said he wanted a pluralist "Islamic democracy", but did not elaborate.

So what happened? The Americans clearly believe Muqtada was lying when he talked of peace, and that, all along, he was planning violent attacks. But there's another, more plausible explanation. Ahmed Shames from the Iraqi Prospect Organisation, a group of young Iraqi democrats campaigning for their country to become free and prosperous, recently journeyed to the heart of Sadr City, the slums in Baghdad where Muqtada's support is strongest.

"Like Muqtada, they were delighted when Saddam was overthrown by the coalition. The Americans entered Baghdad through Sadr City because they knew it was such a friendly area," he explains. "Their main grievance - the thing that is really radicalising them - is that, since then, their representatives have been excluded from all the Iraqi institutions. They aren't on the Governing Council. They aren't even on the local councils appointed by the Americans. Understandably, they blame this exclusion for the fact that their neighbourhoods are stinking and collapsing."

So they could have been co-opted into the system? "Of course. They aren't die-hard anti-Westerners. Sadr's supporters don't have fully formed political views. Look, they've lived all their lives under a tyranny that made everybody too afraid to even whisper about politics, so they are only now finding their political bearings. It is a very fluid time. Muqtada's supporters, like everyone else, are evolving and changing."

Most of the dozens of people Ahmed spoke to - loyal Sadrists - don't even want the occupation to end immediately. Like most Iraqis, they want the transition to proceed pretty damn fast, and they want it handled much better than at the moment. Ahmed explains: "They certainly aren't fundamentalists. I didn't hear anyone talk about Shariah law or any of that. Muqtada is leading a populist movement with a light Islamic coating. Attacking them will only make it grow. The solution is to integrate them, talk to them, deal with them. If the militias eventually have to be disarmed - and they will - let a democratic Iraqi government do it."

At the moment, the Sadr army is still a populist movement without much popularity. The majority of Iraqis, according to the polls, oppose Sadr. It's easy to forget, given the lurid media focus on Fallujah, but most of Iraq is fairly stable and at peace, and most Iraqis say their lives are better than under Saddam. Kurdish northern Iraq, in particular, remains the dazzling success story it has been for over a decade since it was reclaimed from the Baathist dictatorship. Yet every Iraqi democrat I've spoken to agrees that US-led violence in Najaf threatens to inflate Sadr into a popular hero. If he is killed, he will become an icon, and Shia opinion may begin to tip in his direction.

The Americans are failing to sensibly distinguish between the Sunni resistance and the Shia resistance. Talk of the two sides "coming together" to resist the occupation has been wildly misleading. The Sunni resistance is murdering Shia civilians, including buses full of their toddlers. This seems an odd way of uniting with them.

The Sunni insurgents are unappeasable, because they are opposed to the direction in which most Iraqis want to carry the country - towards being a pluralist state whose fate is determined by Shia majority rule. The Shia resistance, in contrast, is fairly easy to calm down. The Shia know that once there's a democratic transition, they've won. They are the majority. They need to be soothed and rewarded as much as possible until then. The cost of failing to do this would be terrible. Any moment the Shia turn against the occupation, the clichés about Vietnam become true. The dream of Iraqi liberation would die.

The Israeli methods for dealing with insurgents will be no more successful in Najaf than in Nazareth. Slaughtering their leaders (and killing swathes of innocent civilians in the process) will not shut them up. It will radicalise the resistance and make a peaceful transition much less likely. It is still not too late. The most radical wing of the Iraqi Shia can be locked into Iraq's emerging democracy, not blasted out of it - but can George Bush, with his rhetoric of "ending evil", be made to appreciate this grey-hued compromise?

j.hari@independent.co.uk
 

It was in a Kerbala market square in September 2002 that the justice of the war in Iraq first settled on me. It was an unexpected and embarrassing sensation because, like every other British person that autumn not on the payroll of Halliburton, I had been convinced that George Bush was about to launch a disgusting assault on a country dreading American bombs.

But I could not ignore what I saw. Not the fear that seized - occupied - the bodies of ordinary Iraqis if you tried to discuss politics, nor the messages ordinary Iraqis were trying to send. If you were alone - although you never really felt alone in Saddam's Iraq - many would offer the least subtle signals they dared. They would pointedly praise British democracy, then talk about their hopes for the future and ask when you thought the war would begin.

When I returned, confused and uncomfortable with feeling support for US bombing programmes, I tracked down the Iraqi groups in London. Exiles sent running for their lives from Saddam made up one quarter of the Iraqi population. Almost all exiles gave the same message: Yes, our families trapped in Iraq want this war to proceed. No, they don't have any illusions about US power - they remember who armed and funded Saddam - but without this war, they certainly face life imprisonment with no chance of parole.

Except at the very height of the war - when I forced myself to look at the pictures of slaughtered Iraqi children on the internet and asked myself, should I be cheering this?- I have had few doubts. Yes, I felt a low sense of horror when I saw the Americans imposing on Iraq the same IMF neoliberalism they have catastrophically forced on Latin America and Russia. This is a form of capitalism far, far more extreme and destructive than domestic US market forces. So I gave as much cash as I could to the new, free Iraqi trade unions to try - pathetically - to counterbalance this. (You can donate at www.iraqitradeunions.org; spread the word.) I tried to remind myself that if the war hadn't happened, Iraqi trade unionists would still be tortured and burned today.

But even despite America's forced market fundamentalism, nothing shook my faith that this war, whatever its motives, produced a net good. Until, that is, one fetid moment last Thursday morning. I woke up to angry Iraqis on BBC News 24. It was a depressingly familiar scene, but then I spotted something stupidly disturbing. They were screaming and shooting in that same Kerbala market square, the one where I sat a year and a half ago. All the accumulated doubts of the past year hit me like a tidal wave.

That night, sullen, I went to visit my friends from the Iraqi Prospect Organisation - a group of young Iraqis campaigning for democracy in their homeland - and, over a melancholic pizza, confessed my doubts.

Sama Hadad, a clever, feisty 23-year-old Iraqi, looked like she had experienced these fears too. "But you have to remember that defending the invasion doesn't mean defending everything the Americans have done since. Some of it has been stupid - like an ABC of how to create extremists. Their behaviour in Fallujah over the past week has been wildly provocative and wrong. But you keep going back to the facts."

But what are the facts? The Human Rights Centre (HRC) in Kadhimiya has been set up by Iraqis themselves from the ashes of Baathism. They have been going methodically through the massive - and previously unexplored - archives left by the regime, which document every killing in cold bureaucracy-speak. The HRC have found that if the invasion had not happened, Saddam would have killed 70,000 people in the past year. Not sanctions: Saddam's tyranny alone.

"Even once you factor in the war and everybody who has died since, it's not as many people as that," Sama explains. "So this war has indisputably saved lives over the past year. Saddam's victims might not have been appearing on your TV screens, but they would be just as dead."

More facts: the opinion polls. Some people understandably complain that Iraqis might not be speaking candidly to pollsters, because they are afraid and living under occupation. If you look at the usually very critical answers they give, that doesn't stand up. In the recent BBC poll (hardly a pro-war source), fewer than 10 per cent said they had confidence in the occupying forces, for example, and 41 per cent admitted they found the invasion humiliating. These are not the answers of a terrified people censoring themselves.

So we can trust the same polls when - among many legitimate criticisms of the coalition - they also find that 56 per cent of Iraqis say their lives are better than before the war. Only 15 per cent want the coalition troops to leave immediately. Remember that the "End the Occupation Now" campaigners have just 15 per cent of Iraqis on their side. The anti-war campaigners must confront the fact that most Iraqis feel their lives are better now. I was beginning to perk up as we went through these facts. Maybe we were not wrong after all.

Ahmed Shames chips in. He has just returned from Baghdad. He went to meet many of the young men who have been rising up as part of Muqtada Sadr's militia over the past week, and achieved a degree of access that even the best Western journalists find difficult. "They do not have some big, developed political agenda," he explains. "Their anger is not ideological anger," he continues. "It's pragmatic. It's about electricity and jobs and water. They don't believe they are being represented, and out in the slums - unlike in the rest of the country - their lives aren't getting much better.

"It's still possible to win them round by transferring authority to Iraqis, giving them representation and improving the economy," he continues. "This isn't some grand demonstration of tribalism or proof that Iraqis don't want the democratic transition laid out in the constitution. It's a sign that they are frustrated at the cack-handed American occupation and want them to get on with the transition."

So Tony Blair - rather than George Bush - is right on this one. In Washington on Thursday, Blair will argue that inflating Sadr into an iconic monster - and arresting or killing him - will only make matters worse. Most British Iraqis I've spoken to see him as the Kevin the Teenager of Iraqi politics. "He's angry and pissed off and thinks it all unfair," Sama says. "He's not Bin Laden. However he is dealt with - and he's not the massive threat Bush imagines - it must be by an independent Iraqi government after a swift handover. Anything else will turn it into a pride issue, and will make Sadr much more popular with ordinary Iraqis than he is right now."

If this was Vietnam - a country alternately incinerated and poisoned by the Americans - I would want the troops out. If this was occupied Palestine - a country reduced to sub-Saharan poverty by a cruel and futile Israeli occupation - I would want the troops out. Iraq is not Vietnam and it is not Palestine. After my week of wobbling, I have come to the conclusion that the only decent course is to keep supporting the clear majority of Iraqis: against Saddam, against Sadr and against killing Sadr, and against immediate troop withdrawal. And we must back the Iraqis in the biggest demand of all: a transition to real, full Iraqi democracy - and fast.