Clare Short has given a lead for all those who oppose the war

For her to quit her post just before the biggest challenge her department has faced would be deplorable

So the war will begin, it seems, with Clare Short and without the United Nations. Ms Short will be ripped to shreds in the tea-rooms of Westminster and the columns of the newspapers today, damned as a woman prepared to shout her mouth off but who ultimately puts her ministerial limousine before her own much-advertised conscience. This is wrong on every count. Ms Short is, in fact, showing those who support the anti-war movement the best way to proceed now that conflict – and the demise of Saddam – is ever closer.

The people who filled the ranks of the anti-war demonstration in London now face a choice. Regular readers will know that I disagreed with them all along – as do all of my Iraqi friends – but this is not the time to pursue that argument. Now, you can express opposition to overthrowing President Saddam even as that process is under way if you wish, but you will help nobody and achieve nothing. Or you can instead begin work on the two most desperate issues confronting the Iraqi people: addressing the massive humanitarian crisis that will unfold there in the next few weeks, and strengthening the hand of those leaders who are trying to guarantee that post-Saddam Iraq is a democracy.

Clare Short is staying to do precisely that. She has a brilliant grasp of her portfolio and a greater ability to see this through than any possible replacement. Downing Street insiders, even when they were at their most enraged by her last week, grudgingly admitted that she has an intellectual and practical grasp over her department's work that no other cabinet minister save Gordon Brown can match. For her to quit her post just before the biggest challenge her department has faced since it was created six years ago would be deplorable. Short confronted a choice between the comfortable impotence of the backbenches and applying her expertise to help Iraqis; she made the only morally acceptable choice.

Those who doubt this should listen to the people who best understand the problems ahead: the aid agencies who will be helping the Iraqi people very soon, and are even today in Northern Iraq. For example, Justin Forsyth, Oxfam's UK policy director, explains: "Regardless of what you think about the war – and Oxfam has some very serious concerns about it – Clare Short's track record on international development is exceptional. She is one of the most effective advocates in the world for the issues we care about, like debt relief, both around the cabinet table and on the international stage. Oxfam has urged her to stay because we need that kind of champion now more than ever."

Mr Forsyth is certain that Ms Short will be fighting inside the government to raise the issues that Oxfam highlighted in a policy paper published yesterday. The most crucial is persuading the armed forces to concentrate their fire on the Iraqi military and not the highly vulnerable civilian infrastructure. Would you rather Clare Short had privileged access to the military to make these points, or that she fumed impotently in an emptying House of Commons? She will also be a key figure in arguing that post-war Iraq must be quickly transferred to UN administration (as in East Timor and Kosovo) and then to a democratic civilian administration. Out of government, she would have a fraction of that influence she will now enjoys.

For the sake of the Iraqi people, whatever your views on removing President Saddam, join her in trying to move this situation in a constructive direction rather than wishing it wasn't happening. If only all of the people who joined the anti-war movement had instead fought to turn this into a humanitarian intervention à la Kosovo, the conflict would already look very different. It is not too late: there is plenty you can do now to help Iraqis.

If you are going to march, ditch the old, cheap slogans to "stop the war". Call instead for democracy in Iraq. The Bush administration and its allies are divided on this issue. There are big players calling for post-war democracy, like Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair and Clare Short, and others like Dick Cheney and Colin Powell calling for another dictatorship, albeit a less horrific one.

We, as people who live in democracies, have the capacity to strengthen the hand of the democrats and weaken the autocrats. Another march against the war will achieve nothing now, but marches across the world calling for democracy could tip the balance in this direction. Now is the time to stand in solidarity with the Iraqi democrats, who have called all along for intervention and need our support.

So I appeal to the Stop the War coalition: shift your energies now to post-war Iraq, as Ms Short has. Listen to the Iraqi exiles and to the aid agencies who will be working in the country, and act as they are begging you to. My friend Sama Hadad is one of the leading figures in the Iraqi Prospect Organisation, a group of Iraqi exiles and their children, who have been trying to help people to understand that their Iraqi relatives – still trapped in the prison of President Saddam's Iraq – want and need this war. She says: "Whether you are pro-war or anti-war, what my Iraqi relatives and friends need now is help once the monster Saddam is gone. If only all the energy put into trying to stop this war could be put into helping Iraqis now to build democracy – that is my dream."

Some right-wing critics of the anti-war movement claimed that the protesters were more motivated by hatred and contempt for America than by concern for the Iraqi people. I never thought that was true of anything but a small minority, who are increasingly shunned and derided. The "anti-American" tag was always misleading; these people no more hated Americans than, say, JFK, in opposing Khrushchev, was "anti-Russian".

The evidence about the motives of the protesters will soon be apparent. When, after the war, the Iraqi people are crying out for help – will the anti-war movement still spend its energies pointing out out that the US president is an oil-loving moron? Or will they take up the Iraqi cause? If raging against Bush proves more urgent than rebuilding Iraq, they will indeed have been proved to be motivated by hatred rather than compassion.

I do not think it will happen: I have more faith in my friends in the anti-war movement than that. They will surely see that the urgent priority now must be to ensure that the people who die in this war – and there will be thousands of them – lose their lives not to clear the way for another American-approved tyrant but for the noble cause of Iraqi democracy and freedom. That fight is not over: it is only just beginning. Side with the Iraqi democrats – and Mr Blair and Mr Wolfowitz and Ms Short – and we are more likely to get through this to an honourable, democratic and – at last – peaceful Iraq.

johann@johannhari.com