Three years ago, as the political party conference season opened, one issue, Iraq and whether Britain should support a probable US-led intervention, dominated proceedings. The House of Commons was recalled for a debate in the middle of the Liberal Democrats’ Assembly. An invasion that seemed almost imminent then did not in fact take place until six months later after a stalemate at the United Nations. The rights and wrongs of what occurred at that time remain a matter of discord.

Three years on, however, the relevance of that disagreement is dissipating. Saddam Hussein has moved from his palace(s) to prison and will not be returning to power. The Iraqi people have voted in one free election; have produced, after much haggling, a constitutional draft on which a referendum will be held on October 15; and, if matters evolve as is scheduled, they will cast ballots again for a free legislature by the end of this year. Left to its own devices, democracy, along with federalism and pluralism, may well be part of Iraqi national life. It would certainly be a striking exception in a region where despotism and dictatorship have for too long been the norms.

The issue now, regardless of the debate over the original decision to depose the Baathist regime, is whether democracy in Iraq is a cause deemed worthy of support, one to be treated with indifference, or even despised as an exercise in “liberal imperialism”. The stakes, which were already very high, have been raised by the public declaration of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his “al-Qaeda in Iraq” that they intend to conduct an “all-out war ” against the Shia majority (and by implication the Kurdish minority as well). This sadistic boast has been followed by a savage and shameless campaign of suicide bombings.

Al-Zarqawi’s vow should render the ethical and political debate about Iraq more straightforward. Those who insisted that the Iraqi “insurgency” was home-grown can hardly maintain that stance when it is being championed by a Jordanian national in the name of a group established by a Saudi-born fanatic. Those who contend that these extremists are best seen as nationalists aggrieved by the Western presence in Iraq cannot truly sustain that claim when they explicitly call for civil war. Those who cling to the notion that the zealots have somehow been alienated from the political process and have to be appeased cannot, surely, fail to observe their glorification of violence.

Conflict within Iraq may well prove harder to create than al-Zarqawi and his ilk have calculated. The Shia community has been extraordinarily resilient in the face of intense provocation. The response of all sections of Iraq to the recent tragedy of a stampede that killed almost a thousand people in Baghdad has been an important and touching reminder of the spirit that does hold Iraqis together regardless of their ethnic and religious differences.

It has been said by some this week that as far as American and British policy toward Iraq is concerned, there are “no easy answers”. The reality is that there is an easy answer — staying the course until democracy has been embedded in Iraq — but it involves difficult consequences. Idle chatter about “exit strategies” and a timetable for a withdrawal is not only a distraction from the task in hand, it is damaging. The issue is not whether one favours war in Iraq, but peace for Iraq. That peace will only be won if democracy takes hold and terrorism is defeated.