The face of 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas, bandaged and beseeching, will be one of the terrible, enduring images of this war. The natural human instinct is to flinch and turn away. But all of us who supported the war, and especially those, like me, who championed regime change to alleviate human suffering, must do the opposite. We must look hard and face the question: how can any war be worth such terrible pain?

The honest answer is that this war is worth it. This even though Ali’s prognosis must be gravely uncertain. Survival is in the balance for a child of his age with second or third-degree burns. The physical harm combined with the loss of his immediate family leaves even a formerly lively youngster with immense survival difficulties.

Twelve years ago I entered a dusty courtyard close to the Iraqi border in southwest Iran. I saw another boy, Amar, with similar burns covering his entire face and body. He, too, had lost all his family. Amar was alive only because of swift action by skilful and generous Iranian surgeons who had grafted large flaps of skin from his back and legs on to his face, hands and front. In the aftermath of battle they had no anaesthetic and had had to hypnotise him so that they could operate. His rehabilitation continued in Guy's hospital, London. Twenty-six operations later and despite enormous pain and continual nightmares, Amar, now my foster son, has emerged healthy, strong and nearly six feet tall; athletic, and, yes, a handsome and forthright young man.

The defining moment for us and our family with Amar came in the darkness of a Friday evening drive to Devon when a small voice in the front passenger seat said in a reflective tone: “I’ve got a family. I’ve got friends, I’ve got a computer. I’m all right.” For Ali, too, that moment might come.

No decent person likes war; and those of us who know and love the region approached this war with heavy hearts. Ali, and many others who we know will suffer, is the reason why. But Amar gives the mirror image, the reason for the use of force as the lesser of two evils, when force is used to destroy dictatorship or to stop genocide after all other options to free a tormented people have been tried and failed. This war is one such case.

For Amar and Ali are victims of Saddam Hussein’s ruthless destruction of civilians in his pursuit of power. Saddam is a modern Moloch engorged with the human blood of his tortured and slaughtered innocent child victims. In Ali's case, his family's home was surrounded by military installations, clear and obvious targets in case of war.

And war was inevitable because Saddam continually sought territory belonging to his neighbours. Each time his invasions failed, he turned his vicious wrath on his own people. In 1988 he chemically bombed the Iraqi Kurds as well as setting in motion the genocidal actions leading to the near-complete destruction of the Iraqi Marsh Arabs and the famous marshlands.

In 1991 the northern and southern uprising that followed Saddam’s disastrous defeat in Kuwait and the allied withdrawal from Iraq were as ruthlessly put down. Amar's family, Shia from the South, fell foul of that destruction. His boyhood looks and freedom were wiped out by a chemical weapon, probably napalm, dropped by an Iraqi bomber.

Saddam and his monstrous regiment of torturers and executioners have relentlessly used pregnant women, small boys and their families, Marsh Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Jews, Christians, Iranians, Iraqi Shia and Sunni Muslims and others who incurred his hatred as human shields and sacrifices. His forced departure leaves in his wake four million refugees and hundreds of thousands of victims of his genocide.

The ferocity of the latest allied coalition force assaults should serve as a continuing lesson to other dictatorships that the world will not stand idly by and watch such slaughter.

But what happens when the bombs stop falling? The long-term rehabilitation of Iraq will demand significant input from the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the UN Refugee Agency and other international bodies. But the essential ingredient without which all else will fail is the Iraqi people. Their own capacity to come to terms with a bloody and terrifying past and to create a future which guards minorities and assures that no new Saddam seizes power will be the test for a Middle East of growing but different democracies, and one free of all weapons of mass destruction. The success of the Iraqi example becomes an imperative.

War is the only way to put an end to the suffering caused by Saddam. Ali and other dead and wounded civilians are the terrible and tragic price that has to be paid. None of this will help Ali — burned, damaged, and without a father or mother to comfort him — as he pleads with us to “help get my arms back”. He asked, do you think the doctors can get me another pair of hands? I hope that the West answers his plea.

Baroness Nicholson, MEP, is European Parliament Rapporteur on Iraq

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