The streets of Mosul and Basra are still studded with the bullet-holes from that terrible month. Saddam leaves them as a constant reminder of the danger of resisting him and of trusting America. I have seen those holes, and noted how Iraqis glance at them with a pale, chastened look. This time, the Americans will not walk away from the Iraqis’ suffering – but the troops have yet, understandably, to be convinced of this.Once Iraqis are certain the Americans will not back off and leave them to the mercy of Saddam, they will explain why they wanted this war This is not idle speculation: it is already happening. In Safwan this weekend, Iraqis called out to US and British troops: “You’re late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious.” Another person said: “I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand.” One woman stated: “For a long time we’ve been saying: ‘Let them come.’ Last night we were afraid, but we said: ‘Never mind, as long as they get rid of him, as long as they overthrow him, no problem.’ ” This was reported in one of the most anti-war newspapers in Britain.Those who still deny all this evidence will know soon enough, once the war is over, what the Iraqi people thought all along. When it emerges – as I strongly believe, based on my experience of the Iraqi exile community and the International Crisis Group’s survey of opinion within Iraq – that they wanted this war, will the anti-war movement recant? Will they apologise for appropriating the voice of the Iraqi people and using it for their own ends?Confronted with the evidence of Iraqis’ feelings, many of the anti-war critics will, I fear, change the subject.

They will say that, whatever the Iraqi people desired, the damage to international law was too great. In offering this argument, they fail to acknowledge a key flaw with international law as it now stands. The foundations for the present system were built in 1945, when the greatest threat to human life and dignity was war between nations. Its structures are designed solely to prevent conflict between states and to secure peace in the international arena – and in this respect, they have been phenomenally successful.What international law cannot do, however, is secure peace within nations. The governments of, say, Burma, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe may be judged “peaceful”under international law, while they are butchering and terrorising their populations There is no peace for people living under tyranny. International law must be changed to allow democracies to act where there are reasonable grounds (as in Iraq) for believing that the people of a country wish it, and where the regime is systematically breaching human rights on a massive scale.Some people, such as the Liberal Democrat spokeswoman Shirley Williams, have voiced the perfectly understandable fear that the alternative to international law is “the law of the jungle”.

Yet people living under a tyranny like Saddam’s live under exactly that chaotic “law” – and international law forbids others to act to end it. To focus solely on the international order at the expense of the level at which people actually live – the national – is to write off the most desperate and needy people alive.It might seem perverse to seek to spread peace at the barrel of a gun; but the peace we enjoy here in Europe exists only because we (along with the Americans) acted with weaponry to banish tyrants The Iraqi people want and deserve the same. If their wishes – as reported unambiguously by Kenneth Joseph and many more like him – are not compatible with international law, then an urgent priority once this war is over must be to reconstruct international law to make it encourage, not hinder, the overthrow of tyranny.johann johanhari
More from Johann Hari. The metaphor of “the theatre of war” has never looked or sounded more appropriate this week, with the attempt to put the tactics of “shock and awe” into effect. Watching the amazing footage of the sheets of flame roaring hundreds of feet into the air as missiles struck the official palaces of Saddam’s regime in Baghdad, one did not think of the technological efficiency of the operation. What one was reminded of was, of all things, the curtain of flame rising silently from the jungle at the beginning of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.That, of course, is the point.