The anti-war and pro-war polemics over a possible United States-led invasion of Iraq have certainly reached a boiling point in Western democracies where freedom of speech is respected.

For example, Tony Benn - a prominent left-winger and ex-member of parliament of the British Labour Party - flew to Baghdad recently and interviewed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to promote what they both conceived as 'peace', which is actually the mere absence of inter-state military conflict.

After returning to Britain, he was not detained without trial for endangering 'national security' although it is now well known that the Blair government is officially quite hostile to Saddam.

On the contrary, BBC later interviewed Benn as a newsmaker and a TV channel also broadcasted his interview with Saddam.

In the Guardian , Prof Noam Chomsky, a well-known American critic of the US establishment, was again invited to give his opinion o­n the war.

Respecting o­ne another's right of free speech is fundamental to the perseverance of the democratic way of life, but it does not mean agreement with views expressed.

Guardian commentator David Aaronovitch, for example, recently challenged Chomsky's definition of national sovereignty as " the right of political entities to be free from outside interference".

He said if Chomsky's definition had to be strictly applied, many more innocent people, especially Muslims, would have been killed or maimed in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s.

Backing Khmer Rouges

If o­ne follows the activist careers of many leftists and pacifists in the West, their comments and remarks o­n global affairs, and the consequences or effects of their opinions are not indisputable, although their freedom of speech has to be fully respected.

Those who were politically conscious in the late 60s and 70s perhaps still remember the many leftists and pacifists who exercised their freedom of speech in London, Washington DC, Melbourne, Sydney and Paris to defend the cause of the Khmer Rouges as part of the global movement for national liberation.

Yet, when the Khmer Rouges evidently committed massive atrocities and genocide against the Cambodian people after taking power in 1975, some of them either kept quiet or denied the facts and reality of the Killing Fields as "bourgeois propaganda" of the Western establishments, including the "bourgeois" media allegedly manipulated by "military-industrial complexes".

What do they say now about the military-propaganda complexes and war machines of the Kim Jong II regime in North Korea where children there are also said to suffer from starvation and malnutrition?

I do not think that it was wrong for them to support national liberation movements at that time. Contrary to the opinions of many Western right-wingers, this writer holds firmly to the view that, in general, national liberation movements are not terrorism if and when they conduct their armed struggles according to the minimum conduct of war.

The principles of the minimum conduct of war include discrimination (of targets) and proportionality (of the force used against the magnitude of the force of the enemy).

However, I also think that o­ne's support for any cause, however noble and worthy in principle or theory, must also be balanced, prudent, honest and reality-sensitive.

As a British political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797) o­nce remarked, "Men must have a certain fund of moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves and a perfect nuisance to everybody else." (Edmund Burke, Reflections o­n the Revolution in France, London, Penguin, 1986; first published in 1790)

Errors o­n judgement

To be balanced, prudent, honest and reality-sensitive, o­ne has to be ever ready to admit mistakes and errors in judgement if new information comes to light.

It also means that o­ne has to learn from historical lessons that the morality of many things in this real world cannot be ascertained with certitude by high-sounding and politically correct but superficial slogans, or through mere impressions.

For example, many now think that US and Britain are "warmongering" because of the "greed for oil" in Iraq and the Middle East, and France, Russia, Germany and China are for "peace".

This is o­nly o­ne side of the argument or impression, and there is another side that must also be boldly told to balance against o­ne-sided anti-war opinions and ideological fixations of the left or bigoted self-righteousness of the pacifists.

First, if the "greed for oil" o­n the parts of US and UK coincide with the liberation of the Iraqi people from tyranny, regional security of the Middle East and international security against weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, why is it so wrong?

Second, what did the US and UK gain materially from their military interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Somalia?

In fact, it could also be argued that France, Russia, China and Germany are not as peace-loving as the first impression suggests. There military strategists could be more concerned with the grand strategy of attempting to balance what they perceive to be the unilateral hegemony of the US, and Iraq is just a pawn in the geopolitical game of the powers-that-be in Paris, Moscow, Beijing and Berlin.

If that is the case, is it moral and right for the Kurds, Shiahs and other dissidents to continue to be killed, harmed and jailed, and for Iraqi children to be armed as soldiers, just because the faceless strategists of other nations are concerned o­nly with geopolitical manipulation against the United States and its allies?

Is it also really true that France, Russia, China and Germany have no vested financial interests in Iraq?

According to BBC European affairs analyst William Horsley, "big French oil firm TotalFinaElf hopes to win valuable contracts in Iraqi oilfields whenever the current international sanctions are lifted", and "some five percent of the French oil import still come from Iraq".

Moreover, as Horsley reminds us, "French firms built a nuclear power plant at Osirak near Baghdad" and its arms merchants also sold fighter aircraft, missiles, radar and other weapon systems worth an estimated US$25 billon". (BBC World News, Feb 4, 2003)

No high moral grounds

China, the seemingly most disinterested and 'innocent' country is also said to have attempted to secretly defy UN sanctions by securing a commercial contract to build "a nationwide fibre-optic communications network" for the Saddam regime after January 2001.

The system could, had it not been discovered and stopped, have been used to vastly improve the command, communication, control, computer and intelligence of Saddam's war machines. (see Kenneth M. Pollack, "Next Stop Baghdad?" Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002, p. 34)

If vested financial or commercial interests are the real motives for the French, Chinese, Russian and German promotion of 'peace' for the Saddam regime in Iraq, then their 'moral' grounds are not as high as we think or assume.

These observations are of course open to democratic debates.

In any case, there should be a firm consensus among nations, parties, groups or individuals who hold different views o­n the question of war or peace in Iraq: it is that the Saddam regime must now be publicly pressured by international opinion to evacuate all children and elderly citizens to safe places and not to arm them for combats, or mobilise them for human shields.

There is still time to spare and save innocent children and elderly people in Iraq from war which should o­nly be fought honourably among able-bodied adults.

The Saddam regime must also be urgently pressured by international opinion not to use schools, hospitals, orphanages, mosques or churches, and residential houses for military activities or the storage of weapons in the event of war.

JAMES WONG is Chief Analyst of Stategic Analysis Malaysia which produces the subscriber-based Analysis Malaysia . Wong is a former member of parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for Sin Chew Jit Poh (now Sin Chew Daily ). He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew , he and a team of journalists won the top awards of the Malaysian Press Institute for 1998 and 1999.