Johann Hari: Images of death don't stop me supporting this conflict

"Well," a friend snapped at me as she handed me a picture of a burned Iraqi child. "There. You got what you wanted. Happy now?"

Only a psychopath could look at those images - a baby girl who will never grow breasts because her chest is so badly burned, a little boy with no legs, a seven-year-old girl who will never draw breath again - and not question the justice of this conflict. There is something faintly disgusting about even sitting in this nice air-conditioned office lauding the bombs that have done this.

But there is something we must never forget. Nobody - nobody, not the anti-war movement nor Jacques Chirac nor George Galloway - was able to adopt a position towards Iraq that wouldn't result directly in the deaths of innocent people. If we had taken the route preferred by the anti-war camp, people would have carried on dying at Saddam's hands for weeks, months, years - and then died under his deranged son, Uday, and so on and on, corpse upon corpse.

Yes, I know that the vast majority of people in the anti-war movement are opposed to Saddam as well as war; but even in their best-case scenarios, he would have been left to kill people for a few years.

You can't just say, as Harold Pinter does, that he wouldn't have started from here. Only a maniac would; but we are here, and Saddam is in place. The honourable members of the anti-war camp - the great majority of them - advocated alternative ways to overthrow Baathist national socialism; sadly, all of these scenarios would have taken time and also claimed innocent victims.

The human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell suggested arming the Iraqi opposition and the Kurds so they could take Saddam out themselves. I respect this view, but how many thousands would have died then? Would it really have been fewer than in the current campaign?

Noam Chomsky suggested that we should simply lift sanctions, and then the Iraqi people would be strong enough to overthrow Saddam themselves. Yet Saddam ruled for over a decade before sanctions, and he systematically oppressed and murdered all the people who would have overthrown him. Why would this time round be any different?

So nobody who engages with the reality of Saddam's Iraq can take the moral high ground over deaths. Any which way we leaped from here, innocent Iraqis would have died. Giving the pro-war faction evidence of horrible civilian deaths is not a refutation of our case: if the war had not happened, there would be plenty of corpses whose photos we could wave at you (if anyone had cared enough to take those pictures).

It must be borne in mind also that the British and American armies genuinely are straining to avoid civilian casualties. This isn't propaganda: indeed, the main thrust of criticisms of the war within the US are that the war is being fought too softly, and that the Americans are far too concerned about protecting civilians. This argument is becoming popular in Britain. Only yesterday it was voiced by as centrist a figure as Mo Mowlam. When even Mo says you are being too cautious about taking Iraqi life, you can be pretty sure that sinews are being strained to prevent unnecessary casualties.

But, of course, I - like all decent pro-war people - have terrible moments of doubt. What if this war drags on for months and the ghost of Vietnam stalks the Middle East? Whenever I begin to wobble, I call my Iraqi exile friends. They have a concrete stake in this war: their families are there, and it is their country being bombed. It is their faith that the bombing is the only way to end Saddam's tyranny that strengthens my own.

Last night I spoke to Abtehale al-Hussaini, a 21-year-old medical student whose life has been wrecked by the Baghdad regime. Both her grandfathers were butchered: one for being a religious cleric, the other for being sympathetic to the democratic opposition. The hometowns of her family will be familiar to any regular viewer of Sky News: some are in Baghdad, just next to Shula, which was bombed last week. Some are in Hilla; others in the south of Iraq.

She explains: "There is obviously that feeling - seeing kids dying - it takes me aback. But then I think, why didn't we see the pictures of the thousands and thousands of Iraqis murdered by Saddam? They were a tragedy too, and this war is bringing all those murders to an end."

She continues, her voice filled with emotion. "I am horrified by the devastation we're seeing, but there is a bigger devastation that we haven't seen yet, and it's been going on in Iraq for a long time. We need to remember that... My family in Hilla have fled the bombing there, and now we have no contact with them at all.

"The place they fled to is, we think, now being bombarded too. All I can do is pray. But I remember that my relatives were prepared to take this risk to get rid of Saddam. It was the only way to end the nightmare that had been happening to us for decades. It is our right to choose this; this is what we wanted, and we have tried to make that as clear as possible.

"It saddens me that so many of the people in the anti-war movement just weren't interested in listening to us. The important thing now is to fight for Iraqi democracy. That will be the true liberation."

The opponents of the war - and most of my friends and peacetime political allies fall into that category - proclaim that this war is "not in my name". Fair enough: but neither can you speak in the name of the Iraqi people. In Safwan, where they have been reassured that the Americans will not abandon them to Saddam's mercy again, they are already applauding the 101st Airborne and asking to shake Tony Blair's hand.

Of course, while bombs are falling nearby, it is hard to be jubilant. Give it time, and the clear view of the Iraqi people will become even more obvious than it was in the International Crisis Group report (which found "substantial" support for the war within Iraq) and in the views of Iraqi exiles.

Nor does this war place those of us in Britain and the US in greater danger, as many anti-war campaigners claim once they have lost the argument about the Iraqi people. Ricin was found in vehemently anti-war France last week.

Al-Qaeda will, I'm afraid, hate and attack us whatever we do in Iraq. The only long-term way to deal with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is to help the Arab peoples to secure greater freedom and democracy, so that their grievances (many of them substantial and real) can be voiced in a peaceful way. This war might - if Blair's view prevails - bring us closer to that.

So lament the dead, as all sane people do; but unless you can show me that there was another way to get rid of Saddam that would not have resulted in as many or more deaths, then I will not feel guilty.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq war