THAT’S it! I’ve had enough. I’m fed up with justifying the war in Iraq to sceptical friends, family and acquaintances. I can’t bear watching good arguments for the intervention shrivel before my eyes. And most of all, I’m livid that the moral case I have been making has been utterly undermined by the actions of Allied troops.

I can’t simply console myself that Saddam’s torture was worse than our torture. Of course it was, but that doesn’t make ours less repulsive. We didn’t go in to liberate the Iraqis on the basis that we would electrocute them a little less painfully than the previous lot. We went in to bring back human rights and the rule of law.

And what have we done instead? Killed, beaten or mortally shamed hundreds of Iraqis, most of them innocent. Even if they were guilty, sexual assault and humiliation are not in the penal code of any civilised Western nation.

And if those pictures shocked us in Europe and America, just think what effect they must have had in the Arab world. What could better endorse the Muslim view of the West as morally corrupt and decadent than that pyramid of naked male bodies gloated over by a grinning woman?

We are told that there is worse still to come by Donald Rumsfeld, purveyor of Western values to the Middle East and the man who never got round to reading his own general’s report on prisoner abuse because it was “too long”.

For a time I was taken in by the more idealistic of the neocons, who claimed that military action could cut a swath of democracy through a brutally autocratic region. Well, maybe it could have done. But not while the two men at the very top — Bush and Rumsfeld — had already shown their disregard for prisoners’ rights by setting up Guantanamo Bay. Don’t want to be bound by the US Constitution or to abide by those poxy Geneva Conventions? Fine. Pretend you’re in Cuba instead.

With that example, it’s not surprising that American soldiers on the ground — and perhaps their British counterparts too — thought they could get away, literally, with murder. These “terrorists” had already been deemed lesser beings by their ultimate superiors.

And those superiors tacitly endorsed what was going on by taking little action even when they knew what was happening. The Red Cross started complaining to US officials about prisoner abuse more than 14 months ago, but most of the complaints went unheeded. Nor, it seems, was the torture an aberration. The report says that these abuses “went beyond exceptional cases”. This was, apparently, “standard operating procedure”.

Inexperienced soldiers, traumatised by their comrades’ death, will always be tempted to seek revenge. They will refrain from doing so only if their commanding officers are adamant that such behaviour will not be tolerated. This message seems not to have reached Lynndie England and her crew. Perhaps it was not dinned in sufficiently to British soldiers either.

But it categorically should have been. Of all wars, this was the one in which our side had to behave absolutely properly. Unlike the first Gulf War, this was a conflict that was deeply contentious. Our moral high ground was already disputed even before our soldiers decided to hurl themselves off it.

And if we now know of the torture that should never have existed, where on earth are the weapons of mass destruction that should have done? “Believe me,” said Tony Blair before the invasion, “once we get our people in there, you’ll see what Saddam’s been up to.”

I believed him. And I waited. And waited. And I counselled patience on my fretful friends. Iraq is huge, I reminded them. Think how hard it would be to find a small truck of anthrax. But I am still waiting — and it’s more than a year now since the war was won.

Maybe Saddam sent his weapons to Syria before the conflict. Maybe he destroyed them. But you would think, by now, that we would have discovered what happened to them. Enough money has been offered to scientists, enough experts in the Iraq Survey Group have combed the country. And what has been turned up? Niente.

I don’t dispute that Blair genuinely believed in their existence before he went to war. All the intelligence agencies were telling him that Iraq still had WMD. He did not cynically mislead the nation, but he might have read the intelligence reports, hedged as they always are with caveats, through a more sceptical lens.

Saddam also brought the war upon himself by failing to account for the weapons that he used to have, in breach of UN resolutions. But the end result is that we invaded a nation, at great cost to human life, that will probably turn out to have been little threat either to its neighbours or to us.

So supporters of the war, like me, are left only with the morally threadbare argument of ends and means. I passionately hope that Iraq ends up a better place. I pray that democracy takes root there, that the country does not fragment, that al-Qaeda does not find the nation as friendly a base for its operations as Afghanistan used to be. Obviously we can’t pull out now. We’ve started, so we’ll finish. We must do our best to bring peace and democracy to Iraq. We may achieve it — or we may not. But even if we do, I shall still feel uncomfortable that we went to war on unreliable intelligence and that we conducted its aftermath in a manner that casts shame on the West.

And isn’t it usually dictatorships, not democracies, which like to claim that the end justifies the means?

PURITANS’ NEW ATROCITY

MY COLUMN a few weeks ago on the new Puritans in Sydney elicited a barrage of e-mails. Many of them pointed out that Phillip Jensen, Dean of Sydney, was never principal of Moore College, a mistake for which I apologise.

But others are as alarmed as I am by the militant Anglicanism that has taken root over there. This week’s atrocity, approved by the Rev Jensen, has been to tear out the cathedral’s 130-year-old choir pews, replace them with office chairs and tell the choirboys that they will no longer be allowed to sing at Sunday Evensong.

Parents at the meeting burst into tears and, at the end, sung Abide With Me in protest. “It’s not like we can appeal to a higher authority,” one mother told The Sydney Morning Herald, referring to the Dean’s brother, Archbishop Peter Jensen. “We’re completely powerless. I guess this is what the Reformation felt like.” Indeed.

maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk

Mary Ann Sieghart’s column will appear on Thursdays from now on

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