Last year we were able to watch the countryside march from our own balcony; Saturday’s peace march was routed by Lower Regent Street, so we walked down to the corner opposite the Athenaeum Club and watched from there. One could scarcely have told the two marches apart unless one was a tailor. The countryside marchers were, I think, wearing their genuine working clothes, the corduroys fresh from the seat of a tractor. The peace marchers looked more urban; they dressed as they might for a football match or visit to the local pub. Marches are dressed-down affairs nowadays; when did anyone last demonstrate in their Ascot clothes? Probably the Suffragettes.

On these occasions, I read the placards. There was more humour in the countryside placards, but I liked one of Saturday’s slogans, “Make Tea not War”, which a few of the marchers were carrying. The countryside marchers looked more cheerful, partly because they had better weather, but partly because country people treat a visit to town as a party. Both marches had their quota of children, probably more from the countryside; both had their quota of wheelchairs. On Saturday I saw an old lady being wheeled along by a policeman, a touch of Britishness which might have come out of an Ealing comedy.

There was, I thought, one slogan which was missing. There were quite a number which called for “Freedom for Palestine”; I looked in vain for one which called for “Freedom for Iraq”. I did not hear all of the speeches, though I watched Jesse Jackson on television. From what I did hear, none of the speakers expressed any wish to free Iraq, let alone proposing any policy which might help to achieve that.

Obviously, there is a logical difficulty in this. The marchers believed themselves to be kindly people and most of them are. Any demonstration is bound to contain people with underlying anger; in this demonstration there seemed to be an ugly vein of anti-Americanism which had little to do with peace. But the great majority of the marchers were people of genuine compassion, marching because they want other people to enjoy lives of peace and toleration. If they had been marching against apartheid, as many of them no doubt did in the old days, it would have been to draw attention to the intolerable tyranny of the apartheid regime.

In the case of Iraq, the issue of tyranny was passed by in silence. We all know that the apartheid government killed in hundreds, perhaps thousands, but Saddam Hussein has killed in hundreds of thousands. Indeed, the million people on the London march were a shocking image of the million who have died because of him. Nelson Mandela was unjustly imprisoned for decades; if he had been an Iraqi, and acted as he did, Mandela would be dead long since. Not a hero, or a President, but an unmarked grave in the sand. This great demonstration — and it was a great demonstration — was not assembled to support the liberation of Iraq, but to oppose it.

It will be said that this is unfair, that the demonstrators were opposed only to US action without the approval of the United Nations. But that is not really true. The main thrust of the demonstration, and most of the slogans, went against any war in Iraq, with or without UN approval.

The demonstrators were not people who had opposed Saddam’s refusal to disarm under the terms of the UN ceasefire in 1991. They were not people who had marched against Iraq’s treatment of the missing hostages seized in Kuwait, or of the Iranian prisoners of war, or of Iraqi dissidents, or of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs. All of these things had passed them by. When the United States decided to act to enforce the UN resolution on disarmament, or to remove the regime, then, and only then, they decided to protest. Subjectively the march was for peace; objectively it helped Saddam Hussein. He knows that; the march was shown for seven hours on Iraqi television.

Suppose that the peace demonstrators have their way. Vetoes will be passed in the United Nations. Under the pressure of public opinion, the Bush and Blair Administrations will postpone and possibly eventually abandon their attempt to enforce the UN resolutions, including Resolution 1441. Obviously that would be a victory for Saddam Hussein, giving him the glory of having seen off the power of the United States, not once, but twice. His influence would be at its height throughout the Arab, and the whole Islamic, world. Israel would be threatened, as well as Kuwait, but so would the governments of the other Arab countries.

All of this would be true, but what would it do to the people of Iraq? It would slam the prison gates shut, perhaps for another generation. Saddam has two powerful sons, as evil as he is himself, and probably as dangerous. If his regime should survive now, it would be far stronger than before. There was little discussion of the present condition of Iraq on Saturday’s demonstration. All that the main speakers would say was: “We all disapprove of Saddam Hussein. That is common ground.” They should have added: “We all disapprove of Saddam Hussein but we are determined to protect him.” That is the first flaw in the argument of the march.

Yet George Bush is not going to back off. The second flaw in the argument of the march is that the people were marching for peace, but the march was moving the world towards war.

The United States has a settled national policy, which continues to enjoy majority support in public opinion and Congress, that the US cannot accept the possession of weapons of mass destruction by the present Iraq regime. In the last resort, which is now quite close, Iraq must disarm or the US will invade. In Britain, we do not control this policy. We may or may not agree with it. But the decision is an American one. As the US supplies the only substantial capacity for the enforcement of UN resolutions, the US and not the UN will take the vital decision.

As this is so, the only way to avoid war is to convince Saddam Hussein that he has no choice left but to disarm. He has successfully avoided that conclusion for 12 years. Not unreasonably, the United States is not prepared to give him more time, whatever we may think. Peace is not impossible, but it is almost inconceivable unless Iraq disarms. Therefore any action which encourages Saddam Hussein not to disarm is extremely dangerous; it makes war more likely.

Beyond question, the Franco-German stand in the United Nations has encouraged Saddam Hussein. One must assume that these sophisticated governments knew what they were doing. Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder must take the responsibility for making war more likely. Most of the marchers are not willing to face the reality of this risk. They are closer to Charles Kennedy than Jacques Chirac, innocents in a wicked world, such people as Lenin, when referring to foreign sympathisers with his dictatorship, unkindly called “useful idiots”. The marchers did not think they were helping to maintain the torture chambers of Baghdad, but they were. They did not think that they were making war more likely — but they were. And they are good people. One should not forget that.

We have seen all this in history, again and again. It is the syndrome of the Children’s Crusade. The best of motives, particularly the search for peace, can lead the best of people, kindly, conscientious neighbours and friends, to take actions which are potentially disastrous. Many of them confront dissimilar situations with a single mind-set coloured by left-wing idealism or pacifism. Sometimes they are right, as they were about apartheid. More often they fail to realise that strength, which they distrust, is necessary to resist evil.

Throughout the Cold War there were many innocent dupes who played the Soviet game, who joined peace committees, went on peace marches and opposed nuclear weapons. They were so shocked by the fact of nuclear arms that, from the Stalin years onwards, they campaigned to disarm the West unilaterally. Their motives were mostly good, but they were objectively supporting the Soviet tyranny. Even before the Second World War, the pacifist campaign against rearmament, which dominated the Left of the 1930s, objectively helped Hitler.

I respect the good intentions of those who marched on Saturday. Unfortunately, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I am glad that our Prime Minister is not anti-American or an appeaser.

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