‘Wonderful are the cleansing waters of democracy’ extolled Simon Jenkins in a Times editorial following the Iraqi elections. Indeed, one cannot be anything other than delighted that the embryonic political process went as well as it did – regardless of what one thought of the war. But with this feeling of relief comes a pang of guilt.

An episode of Newsnight broadcast on the Tuesday following the elections saw Jeremy Paxman attack Menzies Campbell, one of the leading anti-war orators and a man whose views I have admired greatly in recent years - I was virulently against New Labour’s moral imperialism. But when Paxman turned to Campbell and said: ‘If we had listened to you then these people would not be voting’, I started to question much of what I had come to believe. Worse was to follow as I found myself largely siding with the odious George Galloway who appeared on the same programme. The Respect party member also failed to revel in the democratic glory of the elections appearing almost pro-insurgent. Paxman had had enough: ‘Do you feel even the slightest unease when making political capital out of this?’ he scorned. I switched off with troubled thoughts.

I am 22 and before September 11 I was relatively apolitical. I have older siblings who are in their mid thirties and they and their friends often labelled my peers as being ‘bought-off’: the ‘Playstation generation’ muted by an age of comfortable consumerism. But then came September 11, and Iraq. Parents’ friends who had lived through the sixties counter-culture looked at me with shining eyes and predicted ‘interesting times’, and my generation sensed it too. A life of benign contentment seemed to be over.

But apparently this view is not shared by many: I recently read that New Labour’s election pollsters believe the issue is relatively trivial to most voters and is the preserve of a few ‘headbangers’. This is not the case in my experience: the unprecedented turn that Britain’s foreign policy has now taken is a topic high in youth discourse. Young adults are more political than they have been for years, as was demonstrated by the Prime Minister’s recent interview with June Sarpong and a bunch of teenagers on T4. The first questions put to Tony Blair were about failures in Iraq, before anything on licensing laws, top-up-fees and sex education.
But is the re-politicising of my generation based on false premise? Does the success of the elections mean we were right to follow the United States into Iraq?

Tom Beedham, 23, works for a political think tank in London. He says he is still left with a bad taste in the mouth.

‘The original reason we were given for going to war was that Iraq was a state-sponsor of terrorism,’ he said. ‘But this allegation couldn’t be proved and ever since the public has been in the dark over Iraq. Now we are hearing almost exactly the same rhetoric on Iran yet people recognise the greater dangers of fighting a war against an organised and well-equipped military outfit.’

‘The Hutton and Butler reports in conjunction blatantly prove that the 45 minute claim was rubbish,’ he said. ‘Butler’s summary was that the intelligence was, for want of a better word, ‘sexed-up’ by members of the intelligence service close to politicians, and that MI6 had serious doubts about its validity. The fact that this answers the question that everyone wanted Hutton to answer, instead of his very narrow analysis of Andrew Gilligan’s journalistic technique, needs to be emphasised. We were lied to. It is as simple as that.’

Whether we should really care if we were lied to or not is another matter. Some, like Michael Gove from the Times, would say that the reasons for going to war are largely immaterial. Blair simply had to get us there to spread freedom and democracy and had to use any method he could. Gove attacked the anti war lobby by saying that September 11 ‘hadn’t really changed’ liberal Britain enough. It was too sated by its own comfortable situation ‘as it proved by its opposition to the effort to change (the world) for the better’. As it was the partial truths that allowed this country to go to war one assumes that Gove readily forgives Blair for using them.

But was it just the extension of democracy and human rights that motivated the Coalition of the Willing? The war was not solely driven by rich Texan companies vying for increased access to Iraqi oilfields, and some conspiracy theorists have taken this too far. But the role of oil and US conglomerates in determining policy needs to be examined for its influence cannot be ignored.

There have been countless stories linking firms such as Halliburton and the Carlyle Group with contracts for Iraq (some were even being sold off before the invasion took place). But special mention has to go to a report published in early February 2005 by the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. It is an audit of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. It found that in just 14 months, $8.8bn was unable to be accounted for. Since then there have been reports of bribery, corruption and deliberate over-payments. George Monbiot reported in the Guardian that more than half the money the CPA was giving away did not belong to the US government but to the people of Iraq. Most of it was generated by the coalition's sales of oil.

Alan Stewart, 22, a student of hospitality management at Manchester Metropolitan University, feels the human cost of the Iraq war outweighs the benefits. ‘I don’t think that the civilian casualties justify what has happened to Iraq over the past 18 months’, he said. ‘As we are yet to really see the outcome of the elections for the Iraqi people I don’t think I’m going to change my mind.’

The point about civilian casualties is important. The Lancet published a report last October saying 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have been killed since the invasion. The government response to this was not only incoherent but indifferent. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary both quoted numbers of 3,000 and 15,000 civilian deaths respectively when questioned about the findings; the first figure was based upon hugely contentious statistics released by the Iraqi ministry of health (who at the time recognised problems with its methodology), the second comes from the website www.iraqbodycount.net whose numbers the Ministry of Defence has scorned in the past. Furthermore, it has been reported that the Iraqi ministry of health's latest statistics show that in the last six months of 2004 coalition troops killed almost three times as many people as the insurgents did.

When one considers such evidence, it is hard not to feel mistrustful of the manner in which we have dealt with Iraq and its people. But should the manner of the invasion really bother us at all? In Stuff Happens, David Hare’s excellent play about the Iraqi invasion, a pro-war British journalist spits:

‘How spoiled, how indulged we are to discuss the manner….from what height of luxury and excess we look down to condemn the exact style in which even a little was given to those who had nothing’.

Pretty damning stuff, and a perspective that certainly made me wonder if I was wrong all along. These people are voting for the first time in fifty years, ‘no other story obtains’. I can just see the posturing of Michael Gove and others if they read this piece thus far – it fits perfectly with the ‘woolly liberal’ portrayal of the anti-war movement, hell bent on dissecting the manner of the occupation rather than trumpeting its results.

But Hare’s play, overall, is far from positive about the invasion of Iraq, and when the dangers inherent in such a policy are considered, one can also reject the notion that we were wrong all along.

The inconsistency of western foreign policy is galling and one can only wonder how its hypocrisy must endanger British interests. When questioned why he was acting in Iraq and not Zimbabwe or elsewhere, Tony Blair replied that the popular belief at the time allowed him to do so: there was a will. This is an important tenet of neo-conservative philosophy: when circumstances allow action, do not hesitate. This is trotted out in the government’s defence when questioned on coherence and consistency, they would if they could but they can’t. But Toby Pragasam, 22, a student of international public policy at University College London, highlights a problem with this.

‘The US often says that Iraq is a stepping stone and they will continue to spread “democracy” and “freedom” whenever possible,’ he said. ‘But this is rubbish: when geo-political and economic situations suit America they have no qualms about promoting corrupt regimes that diametrically oppose the values Bush’s administration supposedly upholds.’

‘Look at Bush’s State of Union speech, Iran was vilified and directly threatened with military action,’ he said. ‘But repressive states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt who defend US interests got off scott free. There was no suggestion whatsoever that either would face any consequences if they did not change.’

A Foreign Office report in November listed 52 people executed by the Saudi government in 2003. On 10th February 2005, Saudi Arabia embarked on a men-only, no-parties election. But Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest markets for British arms. One can draw their own conclusions.

One of the greatest anomalies in British foreign policy was brought to the public’s attention by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. In April 2002, a UN report concluded that Islam Karimov’s regime was guilty of ‘systematic’ torture. The same year Murray reported that the leader of the opposition, Muzafar Avazov, was boiled alive for refusing to abandon his religious convictions.

But Uzbekistan allowed the US to launch attacks against Afghanistan from its own soil. For its troubles, Uzbekistan was rewarded in 2003 personally by President Bush. Its failure to improve its human rights record should have led to a marked decrease or cessation in aid. Bush docked it a token 20%. In February 2004, Donald Rumsfeld visited Karimov and declared the two countries’ relationship as ‘strong and growing stronger’. According to the latest estimates Uzbekistan has 10,000 political prisoners. Incidentally, Murray was sacked for pointing out the incongruity in Britain’s approach to Uzbekistan compared with other countries. His exit was engineered by the Foreign Office who tried to justify the decision by bringing 18 disciplinary charges against him. All were dismissed as unfounded.

The sense of unease deepens when one ponders the historical implications of the Iraqi intervention. For years the British empire sustained itself by backing native elites keen to collaborate with the Colonial Office; the US now matches all the criteria of an imperial power despite its readiness to portray itself as otherwise. As Niall Ferguson has pointed out, how can a nation with 750 military bases in three-quarters of the countries on earth considered to be anything else? Like its British predecessor, this American empire needs its janissary politicians, hence the new breed of Washington-backed, neo-liberal politicians who have been trained and educated in the West.

This is not to say that the previous regime in Iraq was more favourable to the Iraqis or the geo-political situation. But we should not be helping to perpetuate America’s empire, for empire has no place in the world today. The calls for a global effort to end poverty are mounting and serve as a frank reminder of how appallingly at least one of the continents were treated by colonial powers in the past. As Tariq Ali pointed out recently, ‘the symbiosis of neo-liberal politics and a neo-liberal media helps reinforce the collective memory loss from which the west suffers today’. Should we therefore be waging a war that is seen by much of the world – and not just the extremists - as imperialist?

Bush and Blair have made another sizable ripple in the pool of history: the era of the ‘pre-emptive strike’. There is no denying that the UN is encountering a difficult period but its commitments to multilateralism and military force as a last resort have seen relatively little global conflict since its inception. At the Nuremberg trials Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister was charged with providing the justification for Hitler’s pre-emptive strike against Norway. This rejection of such a policy has continued throughout the post-war era. Do we really want to resurrect it?

So why should we have gone to war? We are still searching for a justification. A common validation is that Islam is resistant to democracy and this view is proferred by both sides of the political spectrum. It is this philosophy, together with the flippant refusal to learn history’s lessons which constructs the obvious reason why the war should never have happened. It is no coincidence that al-Qaida favoured belligerent Bush over compromising Kerry in the US presidential elections. The war in Iraq is fuelling the war on terror, not winning it.

In Adam Curtis’ eye-opening BBC series The Power of Nightmares, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is traced from the early 1980s. Curtis believes extremists hi-jacked Abdullah Azzam’s CIA-backed jihad against Soviet intervention into Afghanistan and spawned a more militant version. The fundamentalists were intent on rejecting all liberal concepts such as democracy (which they believed to be the fault of the west) and ushering in a Pan-Islamic conversion to the Koran as the state’s absolute law.

Their efforts were thwarted throughout the 1990s. Countries such as Algeria and Egypt rejected radical, religious regimes and by the end of the decade the movement looked to be on its last legs. It mobilised for one final attempt and struck at the heart of all they despised: democracy, freedom, civil rights. It is cruel that America can be proud she was targeted in this way. She should not be proud of her response; the success of September 11 for the extremists knows no bounds.

Since the neo-Conservative led response to September 11, the ranks of the fundamentalist movement have swollen beyond recognition. Muslims all around the world are angry about the West’s heavy-handed tactics. This is not to say that Islam rejects democracy - Indonesia and Turkey, two of the world’s largest Muslim nations, are fledgling democracies. But every time politicians and the media imply as such, another moderate will become militant. (And domestically, another vote will go to Robert Kilroy-Silk.)

Yes, what implication domestically do we have in Britain, apart from the increased threat of terrorism from abroad that the war in Iraq has created? Tom Beedham is also worried about what is happening to closer to home.

‘We now have a reduction in civil liberties without precedent,’ he said. ‘When you add this to the mix, it becomes even more unsavoury - the rights of the individual are what hold the state to account. The government seems intent on waging a war without public backing and, at the same time, launches a domestic attack on the very mechanisms which can keep them in check. It’s very worrying.’

The official line is that the security threats we face today are so challenging to society at large that the curtailment of civil rights is justified. The defence academic and former air marshal Lord Garden believes otherwise.

‘The threat of a nuclear war did not appear to generate much repressive governance in Western nations,’ he said. ‘The period of McCarthyism in the early 1950s in the United States was perhaps as extreme as reaction in democracies became, and did not persist. Today there is a long list of security challenges, but none carry the same risk of immediate global mass casualties.’

Michael Gove and others should take a closer look at the Iraqi elections. The results have not even been announced yet; the much-heralded turnout of 60% is but a figure. Debka, a pro US-Israeli website puts the turnout at closer to 40%. The Carter Centre which monitors elections worldwide, refused to send observers. Jonathan Steele’s insightful analysis of the elections in the Guardian points out a further inconsistency. During Condoleezza Rice’s recent whirlwind tour of Europe and the Middle East, she denounced Iran as ‘totalitarian’. The reason given was that candidates at one end of the political spectrum were off the ballot.
‘If Iran qualifies as totalitarian because it holds an election in which voters had only a limited choice, then the same is true of Iraq,’ he wrote. ‘Parties and movements which want an immediate end to the occupation were off the ballot.’
Tom, Alan and Toby all remain opposed to the action taken in Iraq. They all stressed that the relative success of the elections was a crumb of comfort to be taken from the last two years. But serious doubt remained.

‘I don’t know how viable a democratic process can be when it is triggered externally,’ Toby said. ‘When the wish and the means for change do not come from within I would imagine there will always be problems.’

Indeed, it seems almost Machiavellian of the west to think of democracy not as a process, but as an end. Anything goes if you eventually reach your final goal, no matter if your methods make the world a more dangerous place to live in. Seamus Milne put it succinctly in the comment pages of the Guardian: ‘As a 21st century Madame Roland might have said: “Oh democracy, what crimes are committed in your name”.’