Bill Carmichael: A war that was worth fighting

It is an apposite time to take stock and ask the question – was it all worth it?

Conventional wisdom has it that the Iraq conflict was a disaster. It was a war, we are told time and again, that was "built on a lie", that worsened conditions for the Iraqi people and increased the threat from Islamic militants in the West.

As a supporter of the liberation of Iraq from the outset, I'm prepared to accept there is weight to some of these charges. Certainly there were mistakes – most notably the malign influence of Iran and the viciousness of sectarian hatreds in Iraq were severely underestimated.

But nothing I've seen since 2003 has convinced me that it wasn't the right thing to do and that the world is a much better – and safer – place without Saddam Hussein.

Let's look at the charge sheet again. Firstly, that the war was built on a lie. This doesn't hold water. There is little doubt that both George Bush and Tony Blair genuinely believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and therefore presented a grave danger to the stability of the Middle East.

Indeed, the French, Germans and Russians all believed the same thing and as late as 2002, the UN's chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, was assuring Blair that Saddam retained WMD capability.

Saddam could have easily demonstrated to the inspectors that his weapons programme was in abeyance, but he chose – either through misplaced pride or a desire not appear weak – to obscure the fact.

We also know – thanks to the scrupulous post-bellum reports from the Iraq Survey Group – that Saddam had the capability to rearm once sanctions were lifted.

As Blair puts it in his autobiography published this week, if the West had backed down: "The UN inspectors… may well have concluded (wrongly) that Saddam had given up his WMD ambitions; sanctions would have been dropped; and it would have been impossibly hard to reapply to a regime that had been 'cleared'.

"He would, then, have had the intent; the know-how; and, with a rising oil price, enormous purchasing power."

So no lie. But what of the other charges? Is Iraq really worse now than it was under Saddam?

No doubt there is rampant corruption, although probably no worse than most other countries in the region, but at least the rape rooms and torture cells have been closed down and women and babies are not being attacked with chemical weapons.

Iraq remains a violent place, but much of this is the result of long-standing sectarian hatreds that have little to do with the West.

Adherents of the Sunni and Shia sects of Islam have been slaughtering each other for more than 1,300 years and will probably continue doing so until the crack of doom. It's not our fault.

How about security in the West? I'm afraid the notion that Islamist terrorists would have left us in peace if we had not invaded Iraq is provable nonsense.

The Islamists declared war on the West well before the Iraq War – as demonstrated by the 9/11 attacks, the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, the 1998 Nairobi embassy explosion and numerous attacks in India, Israel, Chechnya, the Philippines and elsewhere.

The choice was simple – either fight back or capitulate. By taking the fight to the enemy in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere we have made terror attacks less, not more, likely.

Last, but certainly not least, is the issue of British combat deaths.

Although dwarfed by the death toll in the Falklands, Korea and Northern Ireland, the 179 killed in Iraq is a terrible tragedy for each of the families concerned.

But it must, at least, be some small comfort to know that those

soldiers died improving the lot of the Iraqi people and making the

world a safer place for the rest of us.