Wars have to be justified by the conviction that the alternative is worse

We have not met the conditions for starting a war against Saddam in which we are certain to kill civilians

Three thousand religious leaders constitutes a whole lot of morality. Being picketed by Anglican nuns is a new experience for the spiritually inclined inhabitants of Number 10 – or, indeed, for practically anybody. You would have to be a very special kind of thick-skinned amoralist (a Renaissance pope, perhaps) not to feel uncomfortable on finding all these good people ranged against you.

It is true that some of the arguments used by the religious petitioners against an attack on Iraq were questionable. The Methodists urged that "the Iraqi offer to talk about the readmittance of UN inspectors should be taken up", unaware, it seems, that just such an approach had been made a few weeks ago by the UN, only for Iraq to reject it. The Baptist Union described any attack as being the "essence of madness", which it isn't really, not if it's successful. And someone else opined that "an attack on Iraq cannot be justified morally or spiritually". Which, of course (unless you are a pacifist), it can be.

Then there was force majeure. "The British people are against war", said the nun, enunciating what is not actually a moral position at all. Then she added: "We say please don't, please talk, please listen". Listen, yes. But talk to whom, exactly? Presumably to Saddam.

Yesterday my esteemed colleague Michael Brown, in his column on these pages, recounted how he was a member of a small group of British MPs who visited Iraq in 1989. While there, he recalled, "We were encouraged to make a pilgrimage to the gigantic war memorial where we laid a wreath... Of course, we knew vaguely about Saddam's brutality, but during our discussions I was struck by his quiet voice and diplomatic courtesies." His conclusion was that jaw jaw was then – and is now – better than war war.

But Michael's characteristically honest "knew vaguely" sticks in my craw. In 1988 the war that Saddam started against Iran ended after eight years and perhaps a million dead. The day after the ceasefire was announced Iraqi planes attacked Kurdish villages with poison gas. It had happened before, but this time Western TV crews were soon on the scene. In the US, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Claiborne Pell, tried unsuccessfully to get Congress to impose sanctions on Iraq. This was just months before Michael's visit. Perhaps, too, the delegation had not had time to look at the Amnesty briefings detailing what an unusually dreadful place Iraq was – a place where children would have eyes gouged out to encourage their parents to talk.

Michael obviously didn't know what I had known for years, that the regime routinely used its students studying abroad to spy on their countrymen, to attack them and to intimidate them with fear of what would happen to their families back home.

Not long after the MPs' visit to the quiet-voiced leader, a British journalist, Farzad Bazoft, was arrested as he followed up a story about a suspicious explosion. A drugged confession was extracted from him and broadcast on Iraqi TV. He was tried for spying in a secret court. Mrs Thatcher, among others, pleaded for his life. As the writer Adel Darwish recalls, Saddam made one of his speeches: "The English Prime Minister wanted the spy,'' Saddam said, "she will have him alright...' He paused to puff on his cigar, then exhaled the smoke saying, "in a box.''

"Nine hours later," says Darwish, "the First Secretary of the British embassy in Baghdad was signing for the box containing the body of Mr Bazoft, whose hanging he had to watch."

Parliament back in London was already debating the issue. Douglas Hurd was Foreign Secretary and rebuffed calls for sanctions against Iraq. "Would such economic measures remove the regime?" asked Hurd, replying: "Obviously not. Would they in any way affect its policies? I have to tell the House that in my judgement they would not. Would they do more harm than good to Britain? I think it possible that they would."

A Mr George Galloway rose to support the Foreign Secretary. Hansard records that Galloway began by saying that the Iraqi regime had besmirched the name of the Iraqi people, adding carefully, "as any state which commits judicial murder does". He went on: "Will the Secretary of State accept that the House in general welcomes the cautious approach that he has taken in response?" When some Labour members demurred, Galloway continued: "People who know that part of the world have listened with a sense of increasing gloom to the gunboats being started up and the sabres dusted down in certain quarters. That is entirely counter-productive, and a man has paid for it with his life." So was it even really Saddam's fault at all?

In yesterday's column Michael Brown wrote of George Galloway that his "understanding of the mind of Saddam should be regarded as an asset to be used by Mr Blair". But the asset was always Saddam's understanding of the minds of men like George Galloway and, I am afraid, Douglas Hurd – and the asset was not ours. Less than five months after this debate Saddam Hussein attempted to annex Kuwait.

Saddam is not Hitler; he is not Nasser; he is Saddam and that is bad enough. His Tikrit gangstocracy is among the nastiest regimes in the world; he has invaded two nations, enslaved his own people, built and used biological and chemical weapons and tried to build nuclear ones; and there is nothing in his record to suggest that he is amenable to diplomacy. This is the man who refused to budge from Kuwait between August 1990 and January 1991 when the air war began, and then refused to budge when the ground campaign started. When retreating, he set fire to the oil fields. We could probably do the Iraqi people no greater favour than removing Saddam and giving them a chance to build again.

But we can't. And we can't because the church people are right. Wars are very particular things and civilised nations can't just have them when they feel like it or when they feel they have run out of options. Wars have to be justified, overwhelmingly, by a conviction that the alternative to war is actually worse. And that conviction must be widely held, as it was after 11 September in the case of Afghanistan.

We do not have that conviction. We do not believe that Saddam is behind world terrorism and we have not seen convincing evidence that he is making and may use a weapon of mass destruction. As Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford, has said, we have not met the conditions for starting a war, in which we are certain to kill civilians. This knowledge is causing a crisis of legitimacy that encompasses not just Britain and, say, Schröder's Germany, but will, I think, affect the US.

This is not a fact to be celebrated, because it leaves us with sanctions and no-fly zones, and it leaves the Iraqi people with Saddam. How I wish we had driven on to Baghdad in 1991, and how I hope that Saddam is stupid enough to give us a pretext to get rid of him now.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com