Soon after the huge anti-war street protests a fortnight ago, many hawkish politicians and journalists accused those who marched of giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein. According to them, we were supporting the Iraqi dictator.

For the record, this marcher has never supported the 'Butcher of Baghdad': my purpose in marching against the coming war was to try and avert a conflict that would subject the Iraqi people to further suffering. Having suffered the horrors of the war against Iran, the massacres during and after Desert Storm and over a decade of brutal sanctions, I think enough is enough. But this should in no way be construed as support for Saddam Hussein.

There is some confusion over the goals of the war party: for them, there is little distinction between the elimination of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and 'regime change'. Personally, I am for the latter but indifferent about the former. I am convinced that after being gutted first by the war with Iran, then the Gulf War and its subsequent sanctions, the Iraqi war machine poses no threat to anybody but the Iraqi people.

But the biggest threat to Iraqis is Saddam Hussein himself. If anybody should be the target of a concerted campaign to be got rid of, surely it is Saddam. Here is a man who is directly responsible for millions of deaths, filling entire cemeteries with his own Kurds, Shiites and ordinary Iraqis as well as Iranians and Kuwaitis. Without provocation, he has invaded two of his neighbouring countries.

There is a tendency in our part of the world to dismiss accusations of torture and cruelty committed by our leaders against their own people as 'western propaganda'. Our intellectuals and journalists see in these well-documented charges the hidden hand of the CIA.

These conspiracy theorists are convinced that for purposes of their own, the Americans concoct these stories to justify overt and covert action against tyrants in developing countries. In two devastating books, Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi writing under the name of Samir al-Khalil to escape Saddam Hussein's assassins, has condemned the conspiracy of silence in the Arab world.

In 'Republic of Fear', published in 1989, he writes: "Fear is the cement that holds together this strange body politic in Iraq. All forms of organization not directly controlled by the party have been wiped out. The public is atomized and broken up, which is why it can be made to believe anything. A society that used to revel in politics is not only subdued and silent, but profoundly apolitical. Fear is the agency of that transformation; the kind of fear that comes not only from what the neighbours might say, but that makes people careful of what they say in front of their children.

This fear has become part of the psychological constitution of citizenship. Fashioned out of Iraqi raw material, this fear is ironically the mainstay of the country's national self-assertiveness in the modern era. The violence that remained buried as a potential in the subconscious culture of society's groups surfaced, as this new kind of fear filtered through all the private space that existed on the peripheries of families, boundaries of communities, or by virtue of status or class origin. The result was a true regime of terror whose deepest roots lay in the growing fear that people now had of each other."

Exploring this theme further in his next book 'Cruelty and Silence' published in 1993, Makiya says: "The Gulf crisis revealed Arab silence to mean first and foremost a loss of empathy with the other, a retreat from the public realm into the comforting but suffocating embrace of smaller and smaller units of identity like tribe, religion, sect, and family allegiances. Silence is a synonym for the death of compassion in the Arab world; it is the politics of not washing your dirty linen in public while gruesome cruelties and whole worlds of morbidity unfold around you.

Silence is choosing, ostrich-like, not to know what Arab is doing to fellow Arab, all in the name of knee-jerk anti-westernism which has turned into a disease... Silence is the language of a narcissistic inwardness, endeavouring always to reduce the world to reflections of oneself.

"Silence in the Arab world is silence over cruelty [and is] principally responsible for an Arab moral collapse which has today reached epidemic proportions. Leaders like Saddam Hussein thrive on the silence of the Arab intelligentsia towards cruelty... Breaking with this silence is the moral obligation of every Arab, in particular the 'intellectuals' among us. Nothing else is of comparable importance - not even the 'struggle against Israel'. For all of us who love and identify with this corner of the world, it isn't easy or nice to say such things. That doesn't make them any the less true."

Possibly the only thing that can stay an onslaught on Iraq at this late date is for Saddam Hussein to step down and go into exile. This option has been on offer for some time, but clearly, he wants to go down in a Hitlerian Gotterdammerung, taking his long-suffering people with him. And yet despite his perversity and viciousness, he escapes uncondemned and uncriticized in most of the Muslim world. Truly, the silence so eloquently described by Makiya is all-enveloping.

There are many pacifists who are of the reasonable view that regime change in Iraq would be setting a bad precedent, and after Saddam Hussein, who would be the next leader to be targeted and toppled? But how many other leaders have invaded two neighbouring countries without provocation, gassed their own people as well as a neighbour, and tortured and killed countless thousands of people? Both Idi Amin and Pol Pot were finally toppled through foreign intervention. Many people say that Saddam Hussein must be dealt with by the Iraqi people.

But these poor people live in a Stalinist police state and have been unable to rid themselves of the Ba'th Party that has held a stranglehold on power for over four decades. Just as the starving population of North Korea has been unable to free itself from the iron grip of the Communist Party, the Iraqis are prisoners in their own country.

Indeed, if there is a moral case to be made for intervention in Iraq, it has to do with Saddam Hussein, and not his ruined arsenal. If a Security Council resolution were to be drafted laying out the argument that Saddam Hussein and the Ba'th Party had forfeited their right to misrule Iraq and constituted a continuing threat to the Iraqi people, one would have no problem supporting a UN force mandated to remove the Iraqi dictator. The resolution would give him a week or so to pack his bags and give him the list of countries willing to accept him, and then UN forces would enter Iraq with the sole aim of arresting Saddam if he was still there.

No bombs would be dropped, but planes would fly overhead with the instructions to neutralize any resistance. Chances are that the demoralized and toothless Iraqi army would offer no resistance. Once in Baghdad, the UN would run the country for a limited period while preparations for an election were made. As soon as an elected government was formed, the UN would withdraw.

Granted that many details remain to be sorted out, but by switching the goal from the hazy issue of WMD to regime change, and the agency effecting that change from the US to the UN, the moral equation would be altered, allowing many people who hate Saddam Hussein but abhor unnecessary war even more to support regime change. But the larger questions raised by Makiya in 'Cruelty and Silence' can only be resolved by our own societies.