I'm all for war on Iraq - but only if I see the evidence that Saddam is a threat

Convince me. Publish the dossier. If I am going to have dead kids on my conscience, I have to know the alternative was worse

The simple juxtaposition of the names "Bush" and "Churchill" gave every satirist in Britain the chance to have some simple fun this week. That Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, actually made no personal comparison between the two leaders was almost beside the point. In fact, Rumsfeld's speech to 3,000 marines in Camp Pendleton in California was the (by now routine) invocation of the British politician's pre-war warnings about Hitler's Germans – the warnings that nobody listened to until it was too late. Rumsfeld's key sentence was this: "It is less important to have unanimity than it is to be making the right decision and doing the right thing, even though at the outset it may seem lonesome. Leadership in the right direction finds followers and supporters." As it didn't, in fact, with Churchill until after war had actually begun.

Whatever Rumsfeld's exact words, the image created is incongruous, as it was when Dan Quayle, Bush senior's Vice-Presidential running mate, summoned up the shade of JFK in support of some argument or other during a televised debate. In his new book on the Churchill legacy, the historian David Cannadine quotes the fabled US commentator Ed Murrow as saying that Churchill "mobilised the English language and sent it into battle". This is unlikely ever to be said of the strangely misarticulate Dubya. And the scale of his trashing on this side of the pond partly reflects the fact that the White House's public conduct of the Iraq argument has evolved from being confused to being disastrous and counter-productive.

It is of little comfort to anyone – other than the most purblind hawk – that Mr Bush is revealed to have been reading and absorbing a new book, Supreme Command, the work of a Mr Eliot A Cohen of The Johns Hopkins University. This new tome argues that war is too important to be left to generals, not least because they tend to be too cautious and wussy about it. Cohen uses four political leaders to illustrate his thesis: Abraham Lincoln; Clémenceau, the French leader during the First World War, Israel's David Ben-Gurion; and, inevitably, Churchill. Instead of leaving war to the generals, they all got stuck in. As they should have done, he says, in the case of Vietnam.

The careful disclosure that Supreme Command has been Mr Bush's vacation companion was almost certainly intended to counter the pessimism about any war with Iraq, being expressed by a growing number of military folk in America – a caution apparently shared by some key figures in the Republican Party itself. It may be seen as part of a counter-offensive by the forces of steel and action against the men of jelly who wobble around Secretary of State Colin Powell. When they raise a quivering forefinger and whisper "Vietnam!", the hawks are ready with "Churchill!".

I have not read Supreme Command, but even so I am suspicious of the use that such history is put to. It is interesting how, for instance, Mr Cohen does not give equal time to the losers. What about the experiences of the Arab leaders of 1948, of Kaiser Wilhelm, Jefferson Davis and, of course, Adolf Hitler? Hitler was no great respecter of the pessimism of military men. He defied them in 1938 over Czechoslovakia where they predicted war followed by an Anglo-French victory. And, learning the correct lesson from this experience, he refused to retreat from Stalingrad in 1942 and lost the Sixth Army and (so some say) the Second World War.

Surely the truth is that, when a battle begins, you don't always know which war it will end up being part of. Had there been an Allied intervention over Czechoslovakia, we might now be writing about the Central European War, 1938-39.

What also emboldens the hawks, of course, is more recent history. Their arguments are strengthened – in their own minds at least – by the sheer wrongness of some of the opposition. Before the intervention in Afghanistan there were confident predictions of a humanitarian disaster involving millions and the inflaming of a terrorism that would make 11 September seem like an air-traffic accident. For the BBC, James Naughtie was this week in Pakistan, listening to the dire warnings of an ex-general who argues that Musharraf may fall if there is an attack on Iraq. But I remember this same man – 10 months ago – predicting, with certainty, that Musharraf would fall if there was an intervention in Afghanistan.

And then there is that almost wilful reluctance on the part of many anti-war people to engage with what kind of man Saddam is. Recently I heard one godly lady on Thought For The Day talking so blithely and innocently about the Iraqi tyrant that she made Candide sound like Dorian Grey. They don't want sanctions, they don't want no-fly zones, they don't want military action, yet they absolutely refuse to spell out the consequential abandonment of the Kurds in the north, of UN resolutions, and of any attempt to contain Saddam's regime. Someone cross e-mailed me yesterday and asked me, contemptuously, whether I would be at the next anti-war demonstration. When Saddam has re-admitted the UN weapons inspectors unconditionally, that's when. And why doesn't the anti-war movement agitate for that?

But war? Show me the evidence first. Don't just tell me you have it, tell me what it is. Convince me that the consequences of inaction outweigh the consequences of action. Publish the dossier. If I am going to have dead kids on my conscience, I have to know that the alternative was worse.

This is not the course that the hawks have followed. Instead they now seek to bully the sceptical into war. In so doing they have begun to convince many round the world that they have decided on conflict no matter what the pretext or the consequence. That is a genuinely disastrous perception. I wonder if they know, over there in DC, for example, just how catastrophic it is every time Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan arms-control spokesman and currently member of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board advisory group, snaps his beak at the microphones?

Mr Adelman is a key member of the US "swivel" tendency. If people abroad don't like what the administration plans to do, then that just tells you how fundamentalist/weedy/unimportant they are. Mr Adelman espouses world re-ordering in five easy stages. First a quick war. Second a democratic regime in Iraq. Third, a mass revolution in Iran (good outcome guaranteed). Fourth, fundamental (nice) changes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Fifth, a Middle East agreement. Mr Adelman runs a motivational programme for businesses entitled Movers & Shakespeares, in which he and his wife "select the most apt Shakespeare play to fit the program's purpose". For leadership and ethics it's Henry V; for risk management and diversity, Merchant of Venice; and for crisis management, Hamlet. The next sentence reads: "No prior knowledge of Shakespeare is required."

This Iraq argument now resembles a dark forest in which huge grunting animals crash about – never engaging, but trampling on anything that's in their way. Both sides make the rest of us, with our scruples, look puny. But we're right.

D.Aaronovitch@independent.com