ON BOTH SIDES of the Atlantic, the Stop The War cries are deafening now. Fold the tents; cut the losses; bring them home.

Some of the pleading comes from people whose motives are purely mischievous. These are the critics who opposed the war in the first place and would like nothing more than to see it end in a humiliating climbdown for its authors. Their concern for the Iraqi people or the lives of British and American troops flows in rivers of crocodile tears; their true emotions will be realised in the warm thrill of self-vindication at the spectacle of coalition tank columns rolling, turrets forlornly down, out of Mesopotamia.

You know exactly what these people would say in the unlikely event they got their way. They wouldn’t hail the US and British decision to leave Iraq as the long-delayed but correct decision. It would instead be used as an opportunity to pour scorn on the whole project, to chortle at the hopeless vanity of the Bush and Blair crowd.

But there are many more good, honourable people who have come to the same conclusion not out of a desire for self-justification but because, whether they supported the war in the first place or not, they have come to see it as unwinnable, or at least they believe the situation so dire that the price — in further blood and treasure — is simply not worth paying. For them the genuine humiliation of retreat is worth suffering if it spares us all greater losses by staying.

This is a wholly understandable reaction. We’re overwhelmed every day with the hard statistics of loss: Britain may soon endure its 100th death of a serviceman in Iraq; America has just passed the 2,000 mark; tens of thousands of Iraqis have perished. We have spent billions of dollars, not always efficiently. These are tangible, measurable losses; hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, billions.

Success is less tangible. It is articulated not in the indicative but in the subjunctive: potential threats removed; future wars that don’t have to be fought. It is numbered in the unenumerable: the slow awakening of human freedom; the steady, incremental spread of dignity it brings to people cowed and trampled for decades.

And yet it leaves its mark in tangible ways, even in the turmoil of Iraq. In a couple of weeks, Iraqis will go to the polls in their millions for the third time this year (the exercise of democracy can be habit-forming, can’t it?). This time they will choose a government that will have real power over the direction of the country. It will be a genuine first in the history of a region where medievalist tyranny has enjoyed five centuries of extra time.

Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein, the most powerful living expression of that legacy, the tormentor of his own people and oppressor of others, stands trial for his crimes.

And the success in Iraq, intangible as it is, was never just going to be confined to the country itself. Look at the broader map of the Middle East.

In neighbouring Syria, another unlovely old regime is cornered. The push for freedom that began in Iraq is steadily wresting Lebanon away from its status as a fief of Damascus. The Syrian dictator is feeling the painful consequences of his attempt to halt the spread of liberty by the old fashioned method of assassination.

In Iran, the proximity to a liberated Iraq is alarming the theocratic thugs who run the country and energising their enemies in the rest of the population.

In Israel, the one people in the region for whom freedom is no novelty, will go to the polls early next year. It looks likely that they will give a new mandate to Ariel Sharon to pursue his unlikely mission of unilaterally settling with the Palestinians.

This, the same Sharon who has been demonised by the same critics of the Iraq war, especially in Europe, is breaking the mould, not only in his own nation, but in the region too. He will push ahead, it seems, with a bold strategy in the teeth of fierce irredentism from the Right, that could result in a Palestinian state on more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and the whole of Gaza, perhaps even with a part of Jerusalem as its capital.

This may not be a direct outcome of the Iraq war, but does anyone really think it would have been possible while Saddam Hussein was actively promoting Palestinian terrorism? The critics of the war were right to say three years ago that it represented the high-risk option. There’s no doubt, as they said at the time, that not invading would have been the safer option.But over time, repeatedly exercising the easy option rarely produces long-term stability. By repeatedly deferring difficult decisions, repeatedly seeking accommodations with an ever more unacceptable status quo, we make the ultimate crisis that much larger, its consequences that much more devastating. The fluid of all those easy decisions crusts eventually into a hard carapace that can only be cracked with explosive force.

We would be making the same understandable but lethal mistake now if we were to decide that, in the teeth of the difficulties in Iraq, we should take the easy option and get out of there as quickly as possible.

Tony Blair famously said after September 11, 2001, that the kaleidoscope of geopolitics had been shaken. An alternative way to put it might be to say that we have opened a kind of Pandora’s box in the Middle East.

We have, surely, unleashed a violent fury of terrorism and guerrilla war that has a broader reach than Iraq or even the Middle East. But we have also unleashed the great virtue that in time will conquer these vices — not hope this time, though we could use some of that, but freedom. It would be a tragic mistake to cut our losses now, long before we have ensured that the virtue triumphs over the vices.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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