Sometimes, the only way to spread peace is at the barrel of a gun

When it eventually emerges that the Iraqi people wanted this war, will the anti-war movement recant?

Kenneth Joseph is a young American pastor who was so convinced that the current war would be waged against the will of the Iraqi people that he travelled to Iraq to act as a human shield. He was convinced that he would be welcomed by the Iraqis as a hero. Yet this week Joseph was explaining that his trip had "shocked him back to reality".

The Iraqi people told him that they saw the war as desirable, despite the inevitably high cost of civilian deaths. (Saddam's thugs are still murdering "dissidents" who question the regime, so they were risking their lives to tell him this.) They said – in footage he recorded on a hidden camcorder – that "they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster."

Every single anti-war protestor should – on the basis of this evidence and similar material I have offered in previous columns about the real wishes of the Iraqi people – reconsider their view. This is not "pro-war propaganda": Joseph was as anti-war as the most vehement members of the Stop the War coalition, but he was also an honest man who could not disregard the evidence of his own eyes.

Who are the real imperialists here: those who want to carry out the wishes of the Iraqi people, or those who want to ignore them in the name of a non-existent peace? And, yes, it was non-existent. There is no peace if, at any time, people can be captured, tortured, burned or raped. Read the Amnesty reports. This was the everyday reality of Saddam's Iraq. Only the dishonest can say that British and American soldiers are interrupting "peace"; they are interrupting a decades-long war, waged by Saddam against the Iraqi people, to bring it to an end. Do not weep that this happening; be proud.

Of course George Bush is unpleasant; of course oil is a factor. They know this, too, but they back the war anyway because it is the only way to get rid of Saddam.

If you honestly oppose the war and think you can defend your stance to the people suffering under Saddam, dial 00964 and then guess an 11-digit number. Ask the civilians there what they want to happen. Go on. Tell them that you oppose the war, and see what they say.

Zainab al-Suwaij, the executive director of the American Islamic Congress, a nonprofit Iraqi exile group, says: "I was shocked at first [to hear his relatives criticising Saddam over the telephone]. It's very dangerous. All the phones are tapped. But they are so excited." Listen to their excitement, and tell them why they are wrong.

So why, you might ask, are the Iraqi armies still fighting? Why have they not surrendered? Saddam's propaganda channels have been reminding the Iraqis of the 1991 betrayal, when the first President Bush told them that if they rose up against Saddam the US would support them. They did as he asked, and they were gunned down. 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.com