I am finding it difficult, in the current world climate of war and hate, to locate my own sense of power, political and personal, and to feel able to act on it. To know that my voice is being listened to, where it matters, in a democratic manner. To know that there’s a structural fairness in the electoral system where I live to protect me, when the voices of myself and others who oppose the invasion of Iraq are being ignored. So forgive me if I argue on a fairly simplistic level here: I am not pro-Saddam; I am not anti-American; I am not an absolute pacifist. There are times when war is inevitable and necessary, as a last resort. But war is always a disaster. And this war is an obscenity perpetrated by ignorant undemocratic bullies. On all sides.

Before the war started, I had hoped that Blair’s strategy in publicly siding with Bush was to raise the stakes in a tough game of poker with Saddam Hussein. I presumed, like most liberal thinkers, that Clinton’s fine mind and subtlety – especially in matters Irish – would have bonded Blair to him and the Democrats, and that the Republican administration would be dealt with pragmatically, but at a distance. Especially given that one of the main safeguards for democratic governance, an independent judiciary, had collapsed in the US, allowing Bush to defeat the man with more votes. Blair’s decision to forge alliances with the enemies of liberal thinking in the US makes a mockery of the voting intentions of the British people. Blair’s opportunity to unite Europe, to counter the extraordinary bullying might of the US, has been lost for generations, and yet his was the party elected to get rid of the Europhobic Tories. Blair’s self-sacrifice on the altar of misguided personal conviction should rightly ensure that he never rules Britain again when the next election comes. However, with the corrupt “elective dictatorship” of Britain’s First Past The Post voting system, by which no government has ruled with the majority of the popular vote since 1935, the chances of true democratic accountability arriving in Britain are slim. 57% of British voters didn’t vote for Blair in 2001. Blair’s abandonment of his party’s commitment to a fairer voting system is a sign, if we needed one now, that he puts power above principle.

As long as no one blinked in the stand-off when Hans Blix’s team was in action, I had (fondly) imagined that the gathering of huge forces around Iraq’s borders, the scarily belligerent language, would give the United Nations the psychological clout it needed to ensure that Iraq remained verifiably militarily impotent, as had been unanimously decided. Admiring Blair’s track record for peace in Ireland, I held my fire when others were attacking him, when people were marching in their millions around the world against war. Naively, I thought that he could finesse a clever stalemate that would bolster the United Nations, ensure that Iraq never bombed or gassed or poisoned anyone again until Saddam’s natural death, and by praising the US to the hilt in their strategic demonstration of military muscle, pacify the beast that had been so painfully wounded on 9/11. I’m sure this strategy must have occurred to him, if only in his dreams. But all this is conjecture. A Middle East Arab nation has been invaded by hated Western forces, against the will of the United Nations.

There is no way that the violence of this offensive act will have any other effects but the following: to fan the flames of Arab and Islamic hatred and suspicion of the West for generations to come; to set off a whirlwind of passionate religious fury that will ensure self-sacrificial acts of terrorism in the West will increase, not decrease; to exacerbate the instinctive Islamic distaste for the selfish, materialistic, ignoble, dishonourable hypocrisy of Western “democracy”, and to encourage an increase in fundamentalist Islamic political movements, perhaps resulting in more nations adopting Sharia law – not the least likely of those being the newly liberated Shia part of southern Iraq.

With Israel even more detested in the region, and therefore more defensive and paranoid, the likelihood of peace with the Palestinians is non-existent for the foreseeable future. What else? Oh, yes, the Kurds will of course want their independent state, and Turkey will invade and occupy Northern Iraq to quash the Kurds, just as Saddam did, to prevent that happening. And they’ll stay there for ever, if Cyprus is anything to go by. And the middle, Sunni part of Iraq, given half a chance, will probably elect a “reformed” Ba’ath party to run its affairs, just as some former Soviet republics now have “reformed” communists in charge, for the Sunnis did rather well under Saddam. Ah yes, this is progress. This is democracy, Western style. And I haven’t mentioned oil once.

This violation of a sovereign state’s integrity can only be done if the highest ethics are being followed, and seen to be followed. It’s the same principle, on a smaller scale, in social work. If I know the children of the family down the road are being abused, I cannot go in with a gun and shoot the parents, as much as I’d like to. I call in the authorities, and get them to deal with it. Taking children out of the only home they know into care may be worse for them. But, by the power invested in them by the state, with proper checks and balances and safeguards, and with intelligence and sensitivity, good social workers can intervene and keep the children at home but also monitor the parents, and so make the best out of a bad situation.

Social workers do not go in, decapitate the parents (and accidentally the baby, in her mother’s arms) and take over parenting themselves, and then, as a treat, take the shocked and awed children to McDonald’s and have the gall to teach them happy families and good housekeeping. The children who are stupid will probably wolf down the Big Mac and Freedom Fries and try to forget what they saw. The brighter ones may decide, privately, to bide their time and take revenge on those who decided to take the law into their own hands and devastate their family and destroy their home and preach the virtues of “democracy”.

And I wouldn’t blame them.