If they try leading from behind they may finally catch up with us

THE MOST striking feature of Saturday’s protest march through the streets of Dublin wasn’t its size, huge though that was. It was its spontaneity, its individuality.

That march was as valid an expression of citizen power as I have ever seen.

From all over the country, people had come to express a view. There were almost no two placards the same, and there was no evidence anywhere of orchestration. A number of the political parties had mobilised their members and activists, but if you add up the card-carrying members of Labour, the Green Party and Sinn Féin together it probably didn't account for more than 2,000 people. Yet more than 50 times that number marched. No political grouping can claim to have inspired them, and no party can claim to lead them. They were citizens exercising a democratic right and duty. For many it was the first time they had ever sought to express their citizenship that way.

The message wasn't anti-American, it was anti-war. I spoke to people in the crowd whose children are living in America. I spoke to Americans. They weren't marching against their country, they were pleading for a peaceful solution to a situation that has got out of hand.

This war has politicised people. Many marched silently, carrying nothing except a conviction that they had to send a message. But the message radiated through the streets of Dublin, and it had to be heard, loud and clear in our corridors of power. If it isn't, then people who marched, in a lot of cases for the first time in their lives, will not forget. They have stepped past a line, and in making the strong political statement they did, they have demanded an answer. It had better be the right one.

I have written about the issue of war with Iraq here before. It seems to me that it is entirely legitimate to want to disarm Iraq, and to remove from its control the possibility of making and delivering such things as germ warfare. It seems to me that it is entirely legitimate to want to see Saddam Hussein gone, and replaced with someone who will be more amenable to international law and more committed to the welfare of the people of the country. It seems to me that it is entirely legitimate to use the weapons available to the organised world to achieve these objectives. Those weapons include diplomacy, economic sanctions, isolation, the sustained pressure of world opinion and support for democratic opposition groups.

But those weapons cannot include war, in the absence of an act of war by Saddam Hussein. When democratic countries start unprovoked wars, or when the UN decides to start an unprovoked war, we will have crossed a line in history. The world will never be the same once that happens.

Perhaps George W Bush doesn't realise that. I cannot believe that Tony Blair, from a lifetime of social democratic tradition, doesn't. Military action, up to and including the invasion of a country, can be legitimate, if it is the only recourse left to democratic countries to stop aggression or oppression. We know from the lessons of history that countries not prepared to face the need for military action can lose everything. But pre-emptive war flies in the face of everything that we value in our concept of civilisation. We cannot go to war with people we dislike or hate or disapprove of. We all know the age-old argument if Hitler had been assassinated, would the world not have been saved the Holocaust and the tens of millions of more lives that World War II cost? Of course it would. But if they are the scales we are going to use, how many more murders and assassinations would be justified in the last 100 years? Once we accept a justification of that kind, who is safe? And even if those scales are acceptable, even if we all accept that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the world, how many of the people of Iraq are expendable in the pursuit of one tyrant? In liberating Iraq from the evil of Hussein, how many Iraqis is it all right to kill? 10,000? 100,000? A million?

THIS impending war is wrong in principle. Its purposes and objectives may be legitimate, but the method will rob it of legitimacy. It is open to the UN to make other demands on Iraq why not a disarmament commission, for instance? Why not an indictment of Hussein for crimes against humanity? Why not a demand that he remove himself from office? Why not an insistence on internationally-supervised elections? Some or all of steps like these may be feasible or they may not. But to jump from incomplete arms inspections to all-out war, without even discussing the range of possibilities short of war that might produce the same result, would be unforgivable.

What of our own Government? From the beginning, they have treated this issue as one they hoped would go away. Foreign policy always involves choices. And the fundamental choice, in all the big issues, is between principle on the one hand and interest on the other.

Our Government is operating on the basis of a number of untested assumptions. Assumption one is that our best interests can only be served by supporting the American position, whatever it is. We can agree or disagree with our European partners, and even the United Kingdom, without long-term repercussions, but America takes no prisoners in arguments like this. When they need friends, they demand them.

Assumption two was that it probably wouldn't come to anything in the end of the day. Either the Americans wouldn't demand too much, or there wouldn't be more than a few cranks and crackpots around to object, or the rest of Europe would get us off the hook.

They never envisaged the nightmare scenario that they would have to take a public position, that it would be out of step with many friendly countries in Europe, and that the people would rise up against it. But now they face that nightmare position.

And the main reason they are in so much difficulty is the usual one a lack of leadership. The Government at its most senior level should have analysed the developing situation with far more care. Ireland's position in relation to the possibility of war should have been discussed and debated far earlier. Warning bells should have been sounded far earlier. In other words, America should have been made aware from the beginning that we shared their objectives, but had profound difficulties of principle with their proposed methods. Any reservations we express now will be betrayal in their eyes, because we have been weasel-like up to now.

In the coming days and weeks, we have to decide whether we are on the side of war or peace. And we will have to act on it. The people have spoken. It would have been better if our Government had led us all to the conclusion we reached on Saturday. But since leadership appears to be beyond them, is it too much to hope that the Government will now follow the people?