See You In Court, Tony

Parliament might have been denied its debate and the cabinet might have been silenced, but there are othermeans of holding the government to account. If, by 4pm today, his lawyers have failed to agree that he willnot attack Iraq without a new UN resolution, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament will take the prime ministerto court. For the first time in history, the British government may be forced to defend the legality of itswar plans in front of a judge.

The case, hatched by the comedian Mark Thomas, looks straightforward. The UK and the US are preparing toinvade, whether or not they receive permission from the UN. Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, has stated thatthe UK will "reserve our right to take military action, if that is required, within the existing body ofUN security council resolutions". But no UN resolution grants such a right.

Last week, Matrix Chambers, the legal practice founded by the prime minister's wife, prepared a legalopinion for CND. Its findings were unequivocal: "The UK would be in breach of international law if itwere to use force against Iraq... without a further security council resolution."

The judge might decide that the courts don't have the authority to rule on military matters, but if shedoes agree to hear the case, the chances of winning are high. If CND wins, its lawyers believe it is"inconceivable" that the British government would go to war without a new resolution, as it wouldlose its remaining moral authority. Activists in the US are hoping to launch a similar case.

If these suits did force our governments to return to the UN, they might not prevent a war with Iraq, asthe security council could grant them the resolution they want. But this would not mean that the exercise wasa waste of time. If the most powerful countries are permitted to wipe their feet on the UN charter withimpunity, then the world will swiftly come to be governed by unmediated brute force.

This is the factor which many of those liberals who support the invasion of Iraq have failed to grasp. If awar is to be accounted just, it must meet a number of conditions. Not only must it reduce the sum total ofviolence in the world, and improve the lives of the oppressed, but it must also be shown not to replace oneform of oppression with another.

It is not difficult to conceive of a just war against Iraq. We know that it is governed by one of theworld's most bestial regimes, and that the lives of its people would be immeasurably improved if that regimewas replaced by a democratic government. If this was indeed the purpose of an attack, if less violent means ofachieving the same result had been exhausted, if it was legal and if the attacker was a nation with no recentrecord of expansionism and foreign aggression, which had no special interest in Iraq's resources, and whosepolitical class was not talking of creating a "new imperium", we should support it. But none ofthese conditions has been met.

It is plain that the US government's decision to go to war came first, its chosen target second, and itsreason for attacking that country third. Everyone seems to have forgotten that the original plan, after thebombing of Afghanistan, was to attack Somalia. Iraq's weapons and the brutality of its government are theexcuses used to justify the expanding "war on terror" which keeps the hawks in Washington inbusiness. Iraq was substituted for Somalia partly because of its oil supplies and partly because it presents amore plausible target.

It is also clear that there is little enthusiasm in Washington either for democracy in Iraq or for Kurdishindependence. Turkey, a key western ally, is fiercely opposed to Kurdish separatism. For the past six months,the US government has been questioning the legitimacy of the Iraqi opposition movement and hinting that itmight replace Saddam Hussein with another military leader.

We should not, of course, ignore the possibility that the US may change its mind about the futuregovernance of Iraq, or that a democratic revolution might be an accidental outcome of an invasion of thatcountry. Nor should we forget that some of Iraq's oppressed peoples would welcome a war against Saddam,whoever waged it and for whatever purpose. But against their understandable enthusiasm must be weighed theglobal consequences of this war.

Victory in Afghanistan greatly empowered the hawks in Washington, and their hunger to attack the nexttarget could be seen as a direct consequence. If we permit the US to march into Iraq, we open the door to anovert form of world domination, backed by force of arms.

It might seem callous to balance the fate of the Kurds and the Shi'ites against these concerns. But justbecause we do not favour an attack of the kind the US proposes does not mean that we cannot support attemptsby other nations, whose record is unsullied and whose motives are unmixed, to destabilise or overthrow theregime, if their action is legal and if we know that this is the limit of their ambitions. Indeed, if we dosucceed in preventing an attack by the US, we surely have a responsibility to lobby for a just means ofhelping the Iraqi people to depose Saddam, led by nations with no imperial ambitions. And we may find thatthis requires military force.

But even this, more legitimate warfare might not be necessary. Troy Davis of the World Citizen Foundationhas been sketching out an ingenious means of pulling the rug from beneath Saddam's feet. The UN, he proposes,should help the opposition groups based abroad and in Iraq's no-fly zones to establish a democraticallyelected government in exile. This government is then given the world's Iraqi embassies and the nation's frozenassets. It gradually takes control of the no-fly zones and the oil-for-food programme. Saddam would findhimself both isolated diplomatically and confronted by a legitimate alternative government. It is not hard tosee how his authority over his own people would be undermined, permitting him to be toppled more easily. Thisplan also ensures that democracy is less likely to be frustrated by the installation of a puppet regime.

But if this option is tried and fails, and if war turns out to be the only means of removing Saddam, thenlet us support a war whose sole and incontestable purpose is that and only that; which will not stop until thepeople of Iraq are running their country themselves, but will stop the moment that this happens; and whosepurpose is not to seize the oil wells, to support the ambitions of some of the most ruthless and dangerouspeople in the western world, or to overturn the norms of international law. But there will be neither a justwar nor a just peace unless we stop the unjust war from being waged. Taking the government to court may be thebest chance we have.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK. This piece waswritten on Nov 25