John Roughan: Bush's war is an offence against international law

It is like watching a blood sport, or an execution. More like an execution since the fox will not run from the hounds in this contest. Nothing was independently authorised either, which I suppose puts it beyond the realm of execution and makes it more of a lynching.

The former Governor of Texas knows all about executions - let's not talk of lynchings - and he went about this operation exactly as state-sanctioned killers do, announcing in advance the time and manner of the deed.

He gave the condemned man 48 hours to fling himself on the mercy of a foreign country while his minions candidly let it be known exactly how their air and ground forces proposed to find and destroy the devil incarnate.

One unnamed Bush person, with more candour than the Administration possibly intended, told a Daily Telegraph reporter they were out to ensure Saddam Hussein did not become another Osama bin Laden.

"It's extremely important to get him," the official said. "The importance might not be obvious immediately but it will become apparent in the months or year afterwards.

"Any day now the situation can deteriorate and all of a sudden bin Laden's got legs again in Afghanistan. The same could happen with Saddam and Iraq."

But it is unlikely. The main reason the little fellow turned his big guns on Iraq is that, unlike Osama, Saddam presented a state target. Defence Secretary Rumsfeld said: "We know his address."

As somebody observed, this is not a war, it is a manhunt - possibly the most ridiculous manhunt in history.

A quarter of a million soldiers, hundreds of tanks, 3000 sea and air-launched satellite-guided missiles, high-flying and stealth bombers and 1000 combat aircraft have been sent after one man.

It is hard to find in history a more personalised military mission on this scale. Even in World War II the enemy was not just Hitler but the totalitarian empire he was building and the hateful attitudes at its core. Saddam has been in no position to build any sort of empire since 1991 and has never threatened Western liberalism as Osama does.

In fact, Saddam spent eight years fighting revolutionary religious rule in neighbouring Iran. Even now, my emigre barber is more concerned about Iraq's largely Shia population than the murderer who has been ruling his homeland for 23 years.

"Saddam is bad, he kills his own people," he said the other day. "But I worry what will replace him. I don't want women having to wear those clothes and being unable to go out of the house or go to school. I am a Muslim but ... "

Nobody is going to weep over Saddam's corpse. He is as guilty as anyone condemned to death. Many will have seen the BBC television documentary that included footage of him presiding at a party conference soon after seizing power.

It depicted him announcing the discovery of a plot against his rule and naming the supposed conspirators, who were in the audience. One by one, they were taken out and shot.

There was, of course, no plot and everyone in the hall knew it. More important, they knew Saddam knew they knew it. He was simply demonstrating the power he was prepared to use, a pre-emptive strike as it were. Intended to shock and awe.

We will hear of many more such atrocities once he has gone. The evil of capital punishment is very rarely the execution of an innocent, it is the cost to a civilised society every time it commits a cold-blooded killing.

Opponents of the death penalty do not side with the criminal, they hope for higher standards than the criminal represents. When people talk of international law they are hoping, I think, for some of the same standards of restraint.

They recognise, unless they are impossible pacifists, that war is sometimes necessary but they want it subject to consistent tests. National defence is one, assistance to a threatened ally is obviously another. Latterly, the United Nations has blessed intervention in civil conflict when genocide or some other humanitarian crisis calls for it.

In all cases, the threat must be real and imminent. It is hard to justify punitive force 12 years after the fact. Twelve years ago Saddam Hussein invited forceful retaliation for the invasion of Kuwait, but that was probably sufficient in the circumstances. By all accounts, his star fell so far in Arab esteem after "the mother of all wars" that even the sanctions were unnecessary.

Since then, his offence has been a failure to meet one of the terms of the 1991 ceasefire requiring him to hand over ingredients of chemical and biological weapons such as he used on Iranians and Kurds in the 1980s. (That was a moment for military intervention if anyone had wind of it.)

To pretend now that the material presents an urgent threat to the world, Bush must argue that conceivably Saddam would pass the stuff to terrorists like Osama. Few of the President's most ardent supporters found that convincing. But he does.

Bush on television is fascinating and chilling. He can say something patently absurd, such as "At this hour American and coalition forces are in military operations to defend the world from grave danger", and he means it.

He says, and truly believes, he is making America safer. He is doing exactly the opposite. He probably has no conception of how ugly he makes America in Muslim eyes right now.

His people in the Pentagon and the Murdoch media can hardly wait to see the full punch and precision of the latest weapons. They are having an exciting time but they are not in a war yet. In wars people get hurt. Sooner or later Americans are going to die in this war and then, only then, will they know whether they should be there.

Herald Feature: Iraq