The lesson of this conflict: America can be a force for good in the world

Anti-war movements must never again assume they speak for the people who are about to be bombed

The message from pro-war lefties such as Christopher Hitchens, John Lloyd, Nick Cohen and myself has always been clear: that each person's stance towards the war should be determined by listening to the Iraqi people. It is their country, and their children who might be blasted apart. It was up to them to decide whether this risk was justified. Unlike most of the anti-war movement, we actually spoke to some Iraqis and Kurds; we did not disregard the International Crisis Group Report; we understood that sometimes a short war is preferable to an endless tyranny.

So let's keep listening to the Iraqi people. "He killed millions of us... Oh people, this is freedom!" said one middle-aged woman on BBC News 24 on Baghdad Deliverance Day. It was a typical remark. The Iraqi people made their will clear by flooding the streets with a massive impromptu party, where, in the words of another woman, on the same channel: "Now we dance like we never danced under Saddam." One old man told Channel 4: "This war was necessary for Saddam Hussein. If you said anything against him, he'd cut your neck and your family's neck. There was no other way [to get rid of him]."

Some cynics have claimed that every conquering army gets cheered. Funny, then, that the Nazis were not cheered into Paris, nor were the Soviets cheered into Hungary or Afghanistan, nor were Saddam's thugs cheered into Kuwait. No: the Iraqi people cheer and pelt American tanks with flowers because, even though about 1,500 civilians and more than 3,000 soldiers did not live through the war to see this day, the Iraqis know that if the anti-war voices had prevailed, Saddam would have continued to slaughter even more. They would still be trapped in Saddam's nightmare today, tomorrow and for years.

But there is no time to rest. Liberation comes not simply through the removal of a dictator; it will only really exist when Iraqi democracy prospers. This will be a tricky process, although far from impossible; democracy already exists in northern Iraq, protected by the US and Britain for the past decade. All those who claimed before the war to care about the Iraqis should now demonstrate that they meant it by lobbying hard for a democratic Iraq.

Those who insist that Iraq will deteriorate and cite Afghanistan as proof that the US will do nothing underestimate the achievements in that country. Two million refugees have gone home, with massive benefit to the Afghan economy; more than a million girls, who had been forbidden from attending school, are now being educated; elections will happen – as promised – in 2006. The country still has terrible problems, but it is far better than under the Taliban. Iraq, which starts from a more modern, less anarchic situation anyway, will start to show even greater advances soon. My Iraqi exile friends were weeping with joy on Deliverance Day at the prospect of going home. But perhaps we should take a moment to consider some of the lessons of the past weeks.

The first, crucial, lesson is that we must beware the dangers of cultural relativism. In the months running up to this war, I expected to have a legitimate argument about whether the US actually would help to build Iraqi democracy after the war. What I did not expect– especially on the left – was an argument about whether democracy is even desirable in the first place. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me that "Arab culture is different, and not suited to democracy".

Less blunt but just as poisonous are the postmodernist arguments: "How can we say democracy is better?"; "Who are we to comment?"; "We must 'problematise' democracy and appreciate its flaws, not spread its problems across the globe."

Some parts of the left have reacted against the horrors of the old resource-stripping imperialism by absolutising cultural boundaries and ignoring the importance of common human values. Ironically, they have become similar to the right-wingers who fetishise state sovereignty and say that protecting a bunch of foreigners is none of our business; they have abandoned the great internationalist tradition of the left. Iraqis are not fools, nor lovers of dictatorship; all people want to be free. Remember that the next time the US (whatever its motives) acts to overthrow a dictatorship. Anti-war movements must never again simplistically assume that they speak for the people who are about to be bombed. Sometimes they will be right; but sometimes a civilian population will prefer American bombs to the totalitarian status quo.

The next lesson is that support for vile dictatorships – even if it is in our short-term strategic interests – will backfire horribly in the end. It was once considered to be in our interests to back the horrific human rights abuses of Saddam because fighting the Ayatollah Khomeini was considered more important than Iraqi dignity. Right-wing Americans helped to sell him the weapons of which we now want to strip him; we trained many of Saddam's soldiers at Sandhurst, and they used what they learnt against us in the end.

The best way to guarantee the long-term safety of the US and Britain is to ditch this approach and to side with democrats across the world, consistently and always. Democracies will not attack us, and they never have.

Today, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, the House of Saud and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt are our "friends", despite their suppression of democracy. We train their men, give them intelligence information and equip them with weapons. One day we may regret backing them. The best way to prevent our becoming trapped in a Saddam-like situation again is to become consistently Wilsonian and to equip only solid democrats with weapons of defence.

The final lesson, I think, is that America can act for good as well as bad. Some of the generation of left-wingers formed intellectually during the Vietnam War have never reconsidered their then justified belief that the US is simply evil. America has not had a Damascene revelation since then: it is still doing obscene things in, for example, Colombia. But there are other American instincts and foreign-policy traditions, and some of them are good; the good US acted in Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing on the European continent, and it acted in Iraq this month.

Our job on the left is not to try to stop America from ever acting; one of the great tragedies of the 1990s, the Rwandan genocide, wasn't caused by too much America but by its failure to act. No, our job is to try to steer this colossus towards spreading the values of its own American revolution: the overthrow of tyranny and the birth of democracy.

j.hari@independent.co.uk