Democracy is a continuous revolution. April 9, 2003, was Liberty Day for Iraq, the day on which one of the foulest of the 20th-century tyrannies was finally destroyed. The liberation of Baghdad was greeted with celebration as well as looting, and by ill-concealed dismay in Paris, Berlin, Moscow and the left-wing British press. It was unquestionably a victory for the United States, not only for the American forces, but also for the American model of society.

The United States has for more than a century been the engine of global liberation. Historical processes have no clear-cut point of origin, but one can identify some of the critical dates.

There was September 11, 2001, when that evil man, Osama bin Laden, destroyed the American sense of immunity from foreign attack. There was August 2, 1990, when the equally evil Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. There was April 4, 1949, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation committed the United States to the collective defence of the free world. There was December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, forcing the United States to join the war. There was April 6, 1917, when the US President, Woodrow Wilson, declared war on Germany in response to unrestricted submarine warfare.

Behind that, there is February 15, 1898, when the US battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbour, which led to the liberation of Cuba. My mother, as a child of six, read the newspaper placards, “Remember the Maine”. There is April 12, 1861, when the Confederate Army bombarded Fort Sumter in defence of the institution of slavery. Even more famous is July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed at Philadelphia. There is a consistency about these events.

The United States usually intervenes with reluctance — it took 13 years to get from the original invasion of Kuwait to the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime. The US has even tried to avoid intervention by propping up authoritarian regimes, as in modern Saudi Arabia. Yet the underlying American idea is the most revolutionary idea in the world. It is the idea of liberty, of human freedom, of self-government and of democracy. Without American, and often British, intervention, most of the present-day democracies would never come in to existence, or would not have survived, particularly the European democracies.

Last week France, Germany and Russia met in St Petersburg to concert their reaction to the American victory. All three had refused to agree to intervention in Iraq on behalf of the United Nations. They share responsibility for the impotence of the UN. Yet France has been saved three times in the past 100 years by the United States, from Prussian militarism in 1917, from Nazi occupation in 1944, and from Soviet communism in the postwar years. French liberty is the product of American interventions; the French Government finds it shocking that the people of Iraq should have the same assistance. Jacques Chirac was a good friend of the dictator Saddam for 25 years in which Saddam killed some 2 million people. It was a corrupt partnership.

The Germans are in much the same position. Three times saved, and now wholly ungrateful under their two-faced Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. In 1918 the Allied victory, which depended on the fresh American troops, overturned the old, aggressive, anti-Semitic Prussian Empire.

In 1945 the United States led the coalition which freed Germany from Hitler. After 1945 the US, particularly during the Berlin crisis, saved Germany from Stalin. In the 1980s US pressure led to the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which made possible the reunification of Germany. The German Government was opposed to Iraq enjoying similar assistance.

The same is even true of Russia. In 1942 the Russians made a magnificent recovery from the defeats of 1941, which had almost proved terminal. But without US intervention, the war could not have been won; probably the Soviet Union would have fallen to Hitler. The Russian people would not have been liberated from Stalinism if the Americans had not won the Cold War. That was a war again tyranny. The Russian Government has been more than prepared to leave the people of Iraq to rot under Saddam Hussein.

Like France, Russia had strong commercial, financial and oil interests in the survival of the Saddam regime. With incredible dishonesty, the Russians even spied on the Anglo-American alliance and passed the information to their ally, Saddam.

The battle for liberty had been the core of US history from the beginning. In the 1770s, the United States fought a victorious war to free themselves from British rule, with some help from France. They fought England for self-government, inspired by English ideas.

It is no shame to be helped to gain national liberty either by foreign ideas or foreign force.

Another vital date in the history of liberty is November 5, 1688, when William of Orange landed in England. We were liberated with the help of the Dutch in the 17th century; the Americans liberated themselves with the help of the French in the 18th; some 30 modern European nations owe their liberty and democracy to interventions by the United States in the 20th.

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