Doing justice, in whatever form, is always about anticipating in the present God’s eventual design to put the whole world to rights, to gather up all things in heaven and on earth into Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1.10). Though God will eventually do this completely and fully, he does not want the creation to lapse into complete chaos in the present age, and so calls into being structures of human government and authority to bring about a measure of order, some kind of anticipation of his eventual putting-to-rights of all things.

The problem, of course, is that human authorities themselves are then tempted to become part of the problem to which they are supposed to be an anticipation of the solution, and then you get the double chaos of tyranny – a chaos held in place by an essentially chaotic, because unjust, rule.

Because one of the God-given tasks of authorities in the present time is to protect the weak and vulnerable from oppression, I believe that police action is often necessary, involving physical restraint and sometimes actual violence to prevent wicked and powerful people getting away with their intended ill-treatment of the weak, poor and vulnerable.

When we ratchet this up a gear to the management of whole countries, it has sometimes sadly appeared to almost all people involved that the same principle is involved when a powerful country attacks a weaker one. That was the validation, for instance, for Britain going to war against Hitler’s Germany in 1939. It goes without saying that the great majority of wars have not had this kind of moral justification, but have used pretexts to cover up some kind of power play, land grab or ethnic cleansing objective.

I believe, and have said so from early 2002 when the idea was first mooted, that for Britain and the USA to go to war in Iraq was not, could not be, and would not be seen as a just war. It was not defensive – the WMD argument was always just a smokescreen, as many in western intelligence must have known – and was clearly and nakedly the ambition of many in the White House and elsewhere, so much so that they were eager to exploit 9/11 as ‘really Iraq’s fault’ right from that tragic day onwards.

Granted, Saddam was a monster (though one who had been created and trained by Western powers when it suited us); but we haven’t invaded Zimbabwe, have we? The fact was that an invasion of Iraq served, obviously and visibly, the financial, economic and business interests of some powerful voices in and around the White House. Even if this hadn’t been the case – even if (a) Saddam really had possessed WMDs and intended to try to use them and (b) no business or economic interests would have been served by going to war – it would still have been the case that:

(i) the USA and Britain could never act as a credible police force in the world, especially in the Middle East;
(ii) imposing the will of the West, by brute force, on another part of the world, simply invokes a might-is-right philosophy which we will strongly object to as soon as India or China attains superpower status and decides to effect regime change in London or Washington;
(iii) invading Iraq always was going to produce chaos in which thousands more would die than had died under Saddam’s rule of terror, and in which more and more of our military would get sucked in without any clear sight of ‘success’ in terms of creating a peaceful, let alone democratic, Iraq;
(iv) every bomb dropped would function as another recruiting agent for Al Qaeda, even among the many parts of the middle East where that group had not before been popular.

All this has happened, and I conclude that this war always was unjust, and that if we wanted to prevent Saddam tyrannizing his own people (why stop there? There are plenty of other brutal tyrants in the world) the best and only way was through . . . the United Nations. YES, I KNOW – this, quickly, to those who at once pour scorn on the very mention of it – the United Nations has been a laughing-stock and, despite many successes (some unsung), has had many failures and muddles. But part of this is because America has had a strong vested interest in keeping the UN weak (just like America doesn’t like the idea of an international court of justice, or the Kyoto protocol, etc.).

We badly need a credible international police force; we don’t have one at the moment; USA plus Britain can’t function as such; we should be working flat out either at enabling the UN to act in that way or at creating a body that can.

Sadly, this doesn’t mean that there is an easy solution to the problem of Iraq as it now is. Having made a huge mess, we maybe do have a responsibility to stay and clear it up. But it may well be that the very presence of Western troops there is itself part of the problem. Why can our friendly allies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia not send in their forces instead, and provide a Middle Eastern solution to a Middle Eastern problem?