It's not very edifying, however you look at it

On Wednesday the most effective speech, in a debate of many such speeches, was made by my old acquaintance Mrs Ann Clwyd. It is very rare to hear a potential interrupter shushed down, which is what happened when a Conservative tried to intervene in Mrs Clwyd's remarks. It certainly helped her, however, that the official Opposition was on her side. Indeed, it was the Opposition which did the shushing. The low fellow who tried to interrupt her was, unlike most of his party, against the war in Iraq. She is in favour of it because of her concern about human rights and, in particular, about the treatment of the Kurds in the semi-autonomous Kurdish province of northern Iraq. It was of their abuse by Saddam Hussein that she gave such a compelling account.

But does Mrs Clwyd really think Mr George Bush is invading Iraq to liberate the Kurds? Has he ever heard of them? Some members of his administration undoubtedly have. They could hardly have avoided it in their negotiations with Turkey to station troops on the Turkey-Iraq border and in other convenient areas. These negotiations have now been successful, at any rate as far as the Turkish government is concerned (the Turkish people remain overwhelmingly opposed to the war). The price was not only a large quantity of fine old dollar bills: it was also – though the precise details remain cloudy – that the Kurds of northern Iraq should be disarmed and that Turkish troops should be allowed to move unimpeded into their region.

The object of that movement would be to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish state, which would comprehend sections of Iraq, Turkey and, possibly, Syria. An independent Kurdistan was, in fact, projected at the peace conferences which accompanied the First World War and which established the intrinsically unstable state of Iraq. But nothing came of the plan. Does Mrs Clwyd realise that the invasion of Iraq not only will make Kurdistan an even more remote possibility but may deprive the Kurds of even the precarious rights which they now possess?

Turkey is not a member of the Security Council. The dollars flew in its direction not to secure its vote but to secure its territory, even if on a temporary basis. The countries whose votes are being solicited are being offered largesse similarly. There was a story last week that the United Kingdom was doing the persuading, while the United States was doing the paying. This may be to overestimate our powers of persuasion – and to underestimate what we shall be asked to pay in the end.

And threats are in the air as well: not so much from us, whose capacity for menace is not what it was, as from the Americans, who are said (in the awestruck tones of one of television's Washington correspondents) to have "destroyed the economy of the Yemen" as a punishment for that country's refusal to support the more easily assembled coalition in the legally very different Gulf War of 12 years ago. The whole complicated process would have aroused the envy, and it may be also the admiration, of the Duke of Newcastle and other corrupt boroughmongers of the 18th century.

But, there is no getting away from it, it is not a very edifying process, whichever way you look at it. It is far removed from the pieties of the United Nations Association or the lessons in civics in our secondary schools, if they still go on. But then, what is now happening at the UN is just as far away from the conventional sentimentalities of the Labour Party. We should not be too shocked. All politics is like this. In 1966, the sainted Barbara Castle promised a new Humber bridge just before the Hull by-election. The late Lord Wilberforce (this did not appear in any obituary of him that I read) was in favour of laws to prevent politicians from buying votes by means of selective pieces of public expenditure. It has always gone on.

What is now going on at the UN is, however, more flagrant and more shameless than is usual of these occasions. And yet, Mr Tony Blair is stuck with it. So is his party. Nine votes good, eight votes not good enough, seven votes not good at all: that is the position, is it not? The exercise of the veto, whether by France or by anyone else, we can probably afford to disregard. Mr Blair will certainly disregard it, as he has indicated on several occasions.

On Wednesday, Mr Charles Kennedy asked him for the umpteenth time – this was at Prime Minister's Questions, before the main debate – whether he would follow Mr Bush in default of any enabling vote by the Security Council. And Mr Blair replied, again for the umpteenth time, that he was confident that the votes would duly be gathered in.

In warfare, as in no other human activity, nothing succeeds like success. Mr Blair may think that if, with no UN resolution, he follows Mr Bush to receive a hero's welcome in Baghdad after a week or so's warfare, his party will forgive him and treat him as a hero likewise. I am not so sure. Indeed, my prediction is that, if this government goes to war without the support of a UN resolution, there will be many more Labour dissentients than the 121 who appeared in the lobby on Wednesday.

There are, according to the Whips, 410 Labour MPs. The payroll vote of government placemen and placewomen amounts to 90. So 199 MPs, just under half, remained loyal to the Government. I fail to see how Mr Blair can hold the line if he goes to war without the authority of the UN. If that happens, he will be a Prime Minister without a party, as David Lloyd George was in 1918-22 or Ramsay MacDonald in 1931-35, and we shall be looking into the abyss; or, more to the point, he will be looking into it.

The consequences of war with the support of the UN may be less cataclysmic but will be no less interesting for all that. Mr Douglas Hogg was the only speaker in Wednesday's debate to deal with this question honestly or, indeed, at all. He said that the imprimatur of the United Nations did not make right what had previously been wrong. You could not justify, say, the dropping of a hydrogen bomb on Mecca (an illustration which Mr Hogg did not employ) merely by saying that the UN had given the enterprise its prior permission.

But Mr Kennedy, for one, has always been ambivalent about what his party's attitude would be if the UN came round to Mr Bush's point of view. The Conservatives did not allow him to forget this. Their great enemies have become the Liberal Democrats. They are to be mocked and denounced on all occasions. I wonder whether this is wise. By contrast, their great hero is Mr Blair. He is the leader they wish they had. I wonder whether this is wise as well.