[B]lair and Bush do share a deep Christianity. One senior member of the White House to whom I talked recently said that one of the reasons for the close relationship between Bush and Blair is indeed their shared faith.

Bishops in Britain and in the United States may denounce the war as morally wrong, but Bush has no doubts about the rightness of his cause. After September 11 he reminded us that "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." In his state of the union speech this year, he spoke of the "power, wonderworking power" of "the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people." The words "wonderworking power" come from a hymn in which they refer to "the precious blood of the lamb, Jesus Christ."

Bush asserts a worldview that is usually dismissed as a heresy—the myth of redemptive violence, which posits a war between good and evil, between God and Satan. For God to win, evil needs to be destroyed by God's faithful followers.

This is alarming to the increasingly secular Europeans.
    -Allies: The U.S., Britain, and Europe, and the War in Iraq

Leftist opposition to the war in Afghanistan faded in November and December of last year, not only because of the success of the war but also because of the enthusiasm with which so many Afghans greeted that success. The pictures of women showing their smiling faces to the world, of men shaving their beards, of girls in school, of boys playing soccer: all this was no doubt a slap in the face to leftist theories of American imperialism, but also politically disarming. There was (and is) still a lot to worry about: refugees, hunger, minimal law and order. But it was suddenly clear, even to many opponents of the war, that the Taliban regime had been the biggest obstacle to any serious effort to address the looming humanitarian crisis, and it was the American war that removed the obstacle. It looked (almost) like a war of liberation, a humanitarian intervention.

But the war was primarily neither of these things; it was a preventive war, designed to make it impossible to train terrorists in Afghanistan and to plan and organize attacks like that of September 11. And that war was never really accepted, in wide sections of the left, as either just or necessary. Recall the standard arguments against it: that we should have turned to the United Nations; that we had to prove the guilt of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and then organize international trials; and that the war, if it was fought at all, had to be fought without endangering civilians. The last point was intended to make fighting impossible. I haven't come across any arguments that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war could be fought without putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths. All these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars. But among last fall's antiwar demonstrators, "Stop the bombing" wasn't a slogan that summarized a coherent view of the bombing-or of the alternatives to it. The truth is that most leftists were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to opposing the war, and they were prepared to oppose it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.

A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible, on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of people killed in the attacks on the Twin Towers, the war is unjust. At the moment, most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way-that the 3,120th death determines the injustice of the war-is wrong. It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing. And the denial isn't accidental, as if the people making it just forgot about, or didn't know about, the everyday moral world. The denial is willful: unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder. This can't be true anywhere else, for anybody else.

The radical failure of the left's response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower?
    -Can There Be A Decent Left? (Michael Walzer, Spring 2002, Dissent)

"I was very influenced by William's reporting," remembers Margaret Drabble, whose novel The Gates of Ivory features a Shawcross-like journalist who travels to Cambodia in search of the truth about that stricken country, only to be destroyed by a reality he had refused to believe. "The Quality of Mercy," she says, "was an important influence on my fiction. Whenever I used to meet William, I always found him engaging, quick-witted and very interesting. I've only met him once since his conversion. It's very depressing what's happened to him."

The conversion to which Drabble refers is not religious, but political. Like his father - whose eventual alienation from the Labour Party earned him the sobriquet Sir Shortly Floorcross - Shawcross has journeyed from youthful rebellion to late-middle-age reaction. Once a model progressive, he is today a fellow- traveller of US imperialism, a committed Eurosceptic, a powerful advocate of pre-emptive war and an apologist for monarchy and inherited privilege who, following the success of his television series about the royal family, is being paid £1m to write the authorised biography of the Queen Mother.

Faced with the ruthless, terrorist nature of the regime, the Iraqi people alone cannot change their government. Only outside intervention can do that. [...] The first and most important thing is to get rid of Saddam's regime. When he falls there will be dancing in the streets of Baghdad, as there was in Kabul when the US drove out the Taliban. The Iraqis will be rid of a monstrous incubus.

If September 11 and America's response to it had not happened, think of the world we would still be living in: the Taliban would still be in power, terrorising Afghans; Bin Laden and al-Qaida would still be planning other outrages unrestricted. The same is true of Saddam today. He not only oppresses his own people savagely but also represents untold dangers to the region and to the world. His defiance also makes a mockery of the international legal system as represented by the UN. The UN's basic responsibility for the "maintenance of international peace and security" is daily undermined by a dictator of whose malign intent there is no doubt. To appease him endlessly is to weaken the UN. That, too, is both dangerous and immoral.

While it would be preferable to have a new UN security council resolution authorising military action against Saddam Hussein, as Rowan Williams argues, it is not strictly necessary. Saddam is already in defiance of existing resolutions and article 51 of the UN charter provides the right to self-defence against the threat he poses to all of us.

Moreover, we all know that the security council, a political body, does not always provide an adequate defence against evil. The council refused to help Rwandans during the genocide of 1994. Nato's 1999 action in defence of Muslims in Kosovo was conducted without a council resolution - because Russia and China would have vetoed it. Weighing the risks of action against Iraq is entirely proper. It is very difficult for the international community to deal with intransigent evil.

The new archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has said that it would be immoral and illegal for the British to support an American war against Iraq without UN authority. King Abdullah of Jordan has warned against an attack on Iraq, saying it would open a "Pandora's box" in the Middle East. The prospect of war against Iraq has provided a field day to anti-Americanism. I would argue that, on the contrary, the illegality is all on the side of Saddam Hussein. The real immorality and the greatest danger is to allow this evil man to remain indefinitely in power, scorning the UN and posing a growing threat to the world. Tony Blair is both brave and right to support American demands for a "regime change" in Iraq.

Weapons of mass destruction are the greatest threat to life on earth. Biological weapons are often called the poor man's atomic bomb. Saddam Hussein is the ruler who has for decades been making the most determined and diabolical illegal effort to acquire them.

The inspectors may find some banned materials, by luck, perseverance and good intelligence - and because Saddam has made cunning tactical concessions. They will never find the bulk of the illegal weapons. But that is not their job. That is to monitor his voluntary disarmament. He is not doing that and he never will. He is in clear breach of resolution 1441 and he always will be. The decision the world faces is: will we let him get away with it again? George Bush and Tony Blair say No. They are right.

By late summer 2003 no [WMD] had been found in Iraq. Blair's critics on both the right and left began to accuse him of misleading the British public and taking the country to war to counter a threat that did not exist. The problem for Blair was that whereas George Bush had always thought that regime change was a good enough reason for attacking Saddam, Blair had always insisted on the legal cover provided by Iraq's flouting of successive UN resolutions and possession of proscribed weapons of mass destruction.

[T]he United States is still the only country that can really change the world for the better.