GIVING the Conservative Party’s support to the war on Iraq and the wider War on Terror was the most important decision I took as its leader. Michael Howard has been correctly criticising the sometimes incompetent prosecution of the war but both of us still believe that the world is a safer place without Saddam in power.

Many people who once shared our support for the war are now filling the newspapers and airwaves with the reasons for their change of mind. I am beginning to wonder if the West has the stomach to defend its way of life. Where is the resolve that greeted the unprovoked attacks of September 11? It appears to have crumbled into an infantile hope that al-Qaeda will leave us alone if we leave its terrorist operations alone. Recent events in Saudi Arabia prove that al-Qaeda remains determined to destroy even the most benign forms of “infidel” influence in the Middle East and, no doubt, beyond.

It’s time for the West to regain its focus. 9/11 brought about a decisive shift in the balance of risk facing every free country and every rogue state.

For free nations the considerable costs of dealing with terrorism no longer outweighed the costs of inaction. Terrorists had shown that their intentions were no longer governed by any moral limits and their expressed duty to obtain nuclear, biological or chemical weapons required a pre-emptive response from all civilised nations.

But the balance of risk facing rogue nations changed, too. Before 9/11 they had observed the disjointed efforts of Western nations to hunt down individual members of terrorist networks, but they saw no action against regimes like theirs that sheltered, financed and armed terrorists. Worse still, they watched while Russia, China and France broke the UN sanctions regime against Iraq with impunity. The campaigns against Afghanistan and Iraq transformed the calculations of rogue states. Libya, for one, has already concluded that its pariah status has become too dangerous.

OUR times force us to choose between appeasement of terrorism or action against the rogue nations that sponsor terrorists. We need a serious debate about the relative costs of appeasement versus action. Instead, discussion has been warped into a one-sided examination of the failures of the war on Iraq.

There have been three main criticisms of the Iraq war: the loss of life during the coalition’s occupation; the Abu Ghraib prison scandal; and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. But we should not forget that each of these problems is part of a difficult transition from much more troubling circumstances. The loss of life in Saddam’s Iraq was greater in every few weeks than the loss of life has been in the year since the coalition has policed Iraq. The appalling abuse that took place in Abu Ghraib reflected a breakdown of detention policy whereas the systematic abuse that took place in Saddam’s prisons was an instrument of policy. WMD have not yet been found but Saddam, left in power, could have developed them very quickly if he had won his spring 2003 face-off with America.

While I fully accept that the oversight of occupied Iraq has fallen well short of what it should have been, nonetheless I am tired of the critics who fail to offer any serious alternative. If Britain followed Spain’s example and retreated under a white flag, Iraq’s emerging security forces would be unable to prevent the balkanisation of their country.

I will continue to believe that the overthrow of Saddam’s totalitarian regime was essential. I never wanted to have to explain in ten years’ time to the British people why nothing was done to stop Iraq-manufactured weapons being used to attack a British city. I can hear the questions: why did you do nothing when you knew that Saddam had been harbouring terrorists such as Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas? When he had been showering money on the families of suicide bombers? When he had defied 12 years of UN resolutions? When he had twice attacked neighbouring countries and gassed his own people?

The 9/11 Commission is currently asking similar questions of Presidents Clinton and Bush. Before that terrible day the world’s leaders had some excuse for erring on the side of inaction. But not since.

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