A majority of MPs have voted for war without any parliamentary or public debate on the alternative strategy of arming the Iraqi resistance to enable it to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They have fallen for Tony Blair's misleading assertion that a western attack is the only way to get rid of the butcher of Baghdad.
Clare Short used this argument to justify her resignation u-turn. Claiming the prime minister had "no option" but to invade Iraq, she ridiculed the idea that he "could do something different".
Tony Blair and Clare Short are wrong. The choice on Iraq was never simply for or against war. There was always a third way. We could help the Iraqi people topple Saddam. With serious military aid from the international community, Iraq's opposition movements, especially the militarily strong Kurds and Shias, are quite capable of demolishing the dictatorship and liberating themselves.
Mr Blair and Ms Short are, however, right to highlight Saddam's human rights abuses as the moral basis for supporting a change of regime. There can be no toleration of a leader who imprisons, tortures and murders. Merely removing weapons of mass destruction does not go far enough. Saddam and his Ba'ath party henchmen must be removed from power.
The issue is not whether there should be a change of regime, but how. Blair and Short are guilty of misleading the British people when they suggest that invasion is the only option.
A US and UK attack on Iraq not only smacks of neo-imperialism, it also has a big military drawback. What may begin as a knife-through-butter invasion could easily turn into a long and bloody urban war in the streets of Baghdad, with very high civilian and military casualties. Forced to engage in house-to-house street fighting, British soldiers may come home in body bags for weeks, months or even years.
Assuming, optimistically, that our troops take Baghdad relatively easily, they will have to remain in Iraq for up to three years to prevent a counter-coup by Saddam loyalists. The price could be high, with allied patrols being picked off in hit-and-run attacks by pro-Saddam terrorist squads. It could be like Belfast in 1972, only 10,000 times worse, with a daily carnage of sniper attacks, booby-traps and car-bombs.
There may be parallels with the way the French were bogged down in Algiers, and the British in Aden, during the 1960s. We could get caught up in a protracted, difficult-to-win guerrilla war against Saddam's 50,000-strong Republican Guard and remnants of his regular forces.
Saddam has presumably learned lessons from the first Gulf war. He will avoid battles in the open desert, where his forces are vulnerable to superior allied fire-power. Instead, he is likely to concentrate his troops in densely populated cities, especially Baghdad, using the population as human shields.
Most of his Republican Guard will discard their uniforms and go underground, posing as civilians, to fight a guerrilla war with no big military hardware and no set-piece battles. Defeating this shadowy, invisible enemy in unfamiliar terrain may be difficult for our troops.
There is also the problem of Iraqi public opinion. To sustain a change of regime in Iraq, we need the Iraqi people on-side. Right now, only a minority of Iraqis favour a western invasion. Although they hate Saddam, most are also against a US and UK attack. They fear civilians will suffer greatly and rightly dislike the neo-imperial connotations of an allied "liberation" where they are treated like pawns, with no say or control over their own destiny.
Saddam is already successfully exploiting nationalist sentiment. Playing the patriotic card against the "western imperialists", he is deflecting and defusing opposition to his regime. High civilian casualties in a war would make matters worse, provoking hostility towards our forces. A US and UK occupation of Iraq could easily become a Vietnam-style fiasco, where we lose the hearts and minds of the civilian population and face growing popular resentment and eventual outright rebellion.
There is, however, a credible alternative to western invasion. The international community could aid an uprising by the Iraqi people - a Vietnam-style guerrilla war in tandem with a "people power" campaign of civilian revolt.
This "change-from-within" strategy would involve providing massive material aid to the Iraqi opposition forces with a genuine base of popular support inside the country: the Kurdish nationalists of the KDP and PUK, the Iraqi Communist party, and the Shi'ite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Instead of creating proxy forces, as the US did with the contras in Nicaragua, the aim must be to empower the authentic voices of dissent inside Iraq to achieve their own home-made democratic revolution.
Compared to western invasion, a domestic insurrection would be far more popular with the people of Iraq. Fiercely nationalistic, they rightly dislike the idea of a US-imposed regime. Saddam's troops are also more likely to defect to an internal revolt than to the armies of "imperialism".
Modelled on the non-violent "people power" methods that bought down the dictatorships in Romania and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, an organised campaign of civilian resistance could seriously undermine Saddam s ability to govern, weakening his authority and strengthening the Iraqi people's confidence that he can be overthrown. This resistance could include workplace go-slows, mass sick leaves, industrial and military sabotage, and the non-payment of rents and taxes.
However, given Saddam's ruthless repression, it is unlikely that civilian resistance alone would be sufficient to overthrow him. Armed struggle is now, regrettably, the only certain way to get rid of Saddam.
The international community should train and arm the Iraqi opposition forces, especially the Kurds and Shias who already have viable armies. This military assistance could be along the lines of the support we gave the Free French forces and the French resistance from 1940-45 - only more substantial.
An even better model of successful military aid is the assistance given by the Russians and Chinese to the Vietnamese people, which enabled them to defeat the technologically superior US forces. If Vietnam can defeat the mightiest military power in history, then surely, with a little help, the Iraqi people can get rid of Saddam?
The Kurds have 80,000 troops, and the Shias have 5,000 to 10,000 fighters. Both are desperate to take on Saddam. But they need more training and better weapons: tanks, helicopter gun-ships, fighter planes, heavy artillery and anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.
The west sold Saddam many of the weapons he uses to murder his own people. Isn't it now time we redressed the balance by arming his victims so they can fight back?
Equipped with the latest weaponry, guerrilla armies could be assembled in the northern and southern no-fly zones, where Saddam's air force cannot penetrate. From these safe-havens, the Kurds in the north and the Shias in the south could launch military strikes; taking most of the rural areas and small towns with relative ease. This would create large liberated areas around the big cities, freeing millions of Iraqis from Saddam's control and bringing tens of thousands of new recruits into the ranks of the free Iraqi forces. With pincer movements from the north and south, Baghdad could be encircled and under siege within months.
The liberation of most of Iraq would leave Saddam holed up in the capital - isolated, surrounded and doomed. With his aura of invincibility shattered, there would be mass defections by his troops and the civilian population would be emboldened to open revolt; paving the way for the guerrilla armies to liberate Baghdad.
This internally based civilian and military rebellion would avoid the taint of neo-imperialism and lessen the likelihood of Muslim states rushing to Saddam's defence. It could also reduce the danger of a wider conflict, drawing in Israel and its Arab neighbours, and minimise the risk of provoking a global Islamic jihad against the west.
Regime change cannot, ethically, be imposed from outside in a flourish of revived western imperialism. Removing Saddam should lead to a democratic state, and not to a new form of autocratic rule by a US military governor and a US-imposed puppet regime. A home-grown change of regime by Iraqis and for Iraqis is the key to democracy, human rights and regional peace.
A democratic Iraq could become a beacon for human rights throughout the Middle East; giving the Arab people their first taste of freedom in a region that is dominated by semi-feudal Islamist dictatorships, notorious for their brutality, nepotism and corruption. Perhaps, in time, it might even encourage similar, long overdue regime change in neighbouring tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria.