The case for war: We must fight to end the Iraqis' suffering

If you are one of the many good and decent people thinking of going on the anti-war march today, I beg you to reconsider. Not for the sake of the British Government; not because of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction; nor for any of the other ridiculous reasons that have been given in the past few months. No. The only moral factor in this war should be the Iraqi people, and their needs – and the Iraqi people's greatest need is for our help to get rid of one of the worst dictators on earth.

Don't take my word for it. You don't even have to go to Iraq, as I did last year, and see the desperate look on people's faces as they tell you – in the barest of euphemisms – that they "love British and American democracy", and ask you, "When will you come to free us? When will we be able to live again?" There is no need to endure the pain of this: the evidence of what the Iraqi people want and need is there in the public domain for anybody who cares to find it.

Approach people in the Iraqi exile community (the five million who have fled Saddam's fascist state), and ask them what their relatives in Iraq are telling them. (If you do go on the march, please note the marked absence of Iraqi exiles). Or better still read the report Voices From the Iraqi Street by the International Crisis Group, a rigorously independent think-tank. They sent researchers into Iraq to compile an extensive survey of Iraqi public opinion. It is the closest we have to a Mori poll of that wretched, oppressed nation.

So did the people of Iraq plead for us to take to the streets to stop this war? No – the opposite. Even in a country where the price for this kind of dissidence is often torture and murder, large numbers explained they want the Americans and British to help them dislodge Saddam through war.

As the researchers explain: "The overwhelming sentiment among those interviewed was one of frustration and impatience with the status quo [i.e. the policy of ongoing containment, the only realistic alternative to war]. A significant number of those Iraqis interviewed, with surprising candour, expressed their view that, if such a change required an American-led attack, they would support it."

A significant number risked death to express their support. How deep do you think the real support is? Yet we cannot hide the fact the war will create a horrific death toll. The estimate is 80-150,000 people, many civilians. No decent person can mask these deaths of people worth just as much as you or I in the grotesque language of "collateral damage". Each death will be a human tragedy.

So this war is going to be terrible – but leaving Saddam in place would be even more terrible. How do we measure 150,000 deaths against 23 million living under a fascist dictator, with many of them picked off and taken to torture chambers daily for "political" activities? (Remember: Saddam has butchered members of his family for disobedience.)

It is a tough moral call: but there will be horrible deaths either way we leap. The difference is the deaths at the hands of Saddam will shore up Ba'athist national socialism, while deaths in war would at least clear the way for a free and democratic Iraq. Anybody who doubts this last fact should go to Northern Iraq, where, under US and British protection, a democracy with freedom of speech and protection of human rights has flourished for the past decade.

This war is literally the only hope for extending this democracy to the rest of Iraq. The policy of keeping the UN inspectors circling a country the size of France in search of weapons that could be contained in a small bungalow is a recipe for keeping Iraqi people under dictatorship and Iraqi democrats in torture chambers, exile or freshly dug graves.

It is a way of propping up the policy of containment. Those who argue this approach has, for the past 10 years, successfully "kept Saddam in his box" should bear in mind we have locked not just him but his entire population into that suffocating box. Nor would simply lifting sanctions secure his downfall. Saddam managed to rule for more than a decade without sanctions – why would removing them now magically secure his overthrow?.

Iraq's infrastructure is in a terrible state, because of a combination of Saddam's Stalinist economy (which generates no wealth at all, and has reduced 60 per cent of the population to dependence on UN food aid) and the policy of containment.

Once it is bombed, parts of it will collapse altogether – so there needs to be an immediate and massive rescue operation which will flood Iraq with food and medicine supplies. But do not kid yourself; Iraq under Saddam is, also, a massive, festering humanitarian crisis with no end in sight except war, and no possibility of food and medicine unless we act to remove the dictator.

The Iraqi people are in a terrible condition right now, whatever we do (40 per cent of Iraqi children, according to a recent report by the charity Warchild, do not think life is worth living). Our choice is between acting now to bring the humanitarian crisis to a head so we can solve it, or to leave it in the hands of Saddam to rot somewhere below the news agenda, where there will be no exciting marches and no light at the end of the tunnel for the Iraqi people.

Life is very rarely a choice between good and bad but between bad and worse. US foreign policy is, God knows, all too often terrible. You don't need to remind me about Vietnam, Chile, or the crimes being committed by the US today in Columbia. (And I hope I don't need to remind you of some of the honourable exceptions – Germany, Japan, the Marshall Plan, Kosovo). US actions can be awful but Saddam's tyranny is demonstrably worse.

If you do decide to go on the march today – and therefore decide that you know better than the people of Iraq what is good for their country – then you will have to listen to speeches from the likes of George Galloway (who describes himself as "a Stalinist") and Tony Benn.

The writer, Christopher Hitchens, has raised a point that I find hard to answer. If we had listened to the Benns and the Galloways for the past 20 years, what would the world look like today? Slobodan Milosevic would be massacring the ethnic Albanians (who are mostly Muslim, by the way) in his fiefdom of Greater Serbia, instead of being on trial for crimes against humanity in The Hague. The Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan, and their ban on all music, to cite one small but revealing example, would still be in place.

The Falklands would have been ethnically cleansed of their inhabitants by a fascist Argentine junta, and Colonel Galtieri's regime would have taken many more years to fall.

My recurring nightmare – literally – is that, when all this is over, I meet up again with some of the friends I made in Iraq (and who I talk to everyday by e-mail), and they say to me: "You knew we hated Saddam, with his torture chambers, his secret police and his 100 per cent 'election' results. You knew we were desperate to overthrow him. You knew about the 5,000 people he gassed at Halabjah. You knew. So when British and American planes were just miles away, waiting to kill Saddam so we could begin to rebuild our country, what did you do?"

How could I possibly tell them I went on a march opposing the war? How will I explain that one million people in my home town actually did?