The trial of the Iraqi dictator will force us to confront our own misdeeds

I am glad Saddam Hussein was taken alive because he still has a great deal to teach us all. Not about forcing democrats into acid baths, although his expertise in that form of law enforcement is undoubted. Nor about jailing the 12-year-old children of dissidents, one of his charming eccentricities. No; Saddam's lessons will instead be to challenge both the global political élites who armed and supported him, and the mass movements who opposed his dethronement.

His trial offers two extraordinary opportunities. The first is for the Iraqi people to seize control of dealing with their own tyrant. They could not liberate themselves, because the dense totalitarian matrix crushing them was too vast. Now, they can dispense their own justice - a crucial element in restoring Iraqi dignity.

Saddam should be held until there is a democratic Iraqi government who can dispose of him as they wish. If they choose to hand him over to an international tribunal, fine, but it is their choice. (And all those who offer a cynical sneer at the thought of a democratic Iraq should pay a visit to Northern Iraq, which has been a free democracy for the 12 years since it was liberated by the US from Saddam.)

The second opportunity is far less likely to be grasped. We can wait for Saddam to start reminding the world of the support he was offered by Western leaders for decades - or we can seize this moment and pre-empt his attacks. The coalition could establish an international truth and reconciliation process where our politicians would confess and apologise to the Iraqi people for their complicity in Saddam's crimes. The genocidal tyrant will, if he is smart, take great delight in reminiscing in the witness box about his old friends Donald Rumsfeld and Jacques Chirac. He will thank them for the weapons they so generously provided. He will talk fondly of his courtship with Ronald Reagan, and remember the sweet words and gifts offered by Margaret Thatcher. Once the infected wound of Saddam is squeezed, a great deal of pus will come seeping out.

The only way to deal with this without looking like repulsive hypocrites is to make our own reckoning with the past. Politicians cannot simply bank on Iraq resembling the US, the nation Gore Vidal has dubbed "the United States of Amnesia" because the Saddam-supporting crimes of its own foreign policy are swiftly forgotten and the psychopathic mass murderer Henry Kissinger is lauded as a wise old statesman.

Nor is this a narrowly anti-American point: as William Shawcross shows in his new book Allies, European leaders were often just as bad in backing Saddam. President Chirac was at the forefront of selling Saddam nuclear equipment in the 1970s (only for it to be destroyed, thankfully, by the Israeli army in a pre-emptive strike in 1981). Chirac lauded the dictator as "a personal friend and a great statesman".

We cannot wish this history away. It is time our governments confront it and make amends. This has been achieved partly by liberating Iraq, but the process must be far more extensive. They must cancel the tens of billions of dollars in debt that Iraqis have inherited from Saddam immediately. If Western banks suffer, good. They should not have loaned money to a man who was butchering innocent people. (If you want to support the movement to ensure that Iraqis are not forced to pick up the tab for their own repression, visit www.jubileeiraq.org.) We should be talking about reparations, not making yet more money from Iraqis.

The process of confessing our governments' involvement in Iraq, although uncomfortable, could actually be a liberating experience for us too, because it would help us to remoralise our foreign policy. The images of the gassed Kurds at Halabja will damn the Reagan and Thatcher governments long after any strategic benefit they might have gained from supporting him is forgotten. Today, for similar strategic purposes, we offer support and weapons to butchers in Uzbekistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few. A process of confessing crimes against Iraq will help to identify our backing of criminals elsewhere - and make it politically harder to back fresh tyrants. This is, alas, one reason why an international investigation along these lines is extremely unlikely.

Yet Saddam has some tough lessons to teach the anti-war movement as well. I see my own support for the war through the prism of two jails. In one world - the world chosen by those who backed the war - Saddam Hussein is sitting in a bare prison cell, ranting that the Kurds he gassed were "agents of Iran and the Zionists" and that the 400,000 people in mass graves being excavated across Iraq were "thieves".

In another world - the world that all serious people admit would exist today if Bush and Blair had listened to the two million people who marched to stop the invasion - it is not Saddam in prison, but the children of democratic dissidents. Don't listen to my description of these now-empty gulags. Listen to the words of the anti-war movement's guru, the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Speaking before the war, he told Time magazine: "The prison in question was inspected by my team in January 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children - toddlers up to pre-adolescents - whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually, I'm not going to describe what I saw there, because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace."

That perfectly captures the moral obtuseness of the anti-war movement. At its heart was the grotesque idea that there could be "peace" for the Iraqi people with Saddam in charge. None of the opponents of the war were actually supporters of Saddam, save for a tiny Gallowayite fringe. But they all prioritised something else over the Iraqi people's desire to be rid of him, whether it was their own reading of international law, their abhorrence of war, or their distaste for the foul right-wing administration in the White House.

Some in the anti-war movement claim that Saddam would have been toppled if only we had lifted sanctions. This is transparently dishonest. The Iraqi people rose up in 1991 and over 100,000 of them were gunned down. Any Iraqi uprising - even if such a thing could have been arranged in such a tightly-controlled totalitarian state - would have been met with vicious force and far higher casualties than the recent invasion. When Saddam issues his ravings from court, we should all remember that, had the anti-war movement prevailed, he would in reality have been issuing the same speeches from one of his seven palaces.

The trial of Saddam Hussein can only remind us of the shocking fact that, when our governments support so many dictators in one way or another, the major protests of the past year have concentrated not on this but on a rare move to actually overthrow a tyrant. Now that Saddam is deservedly in jail, it is time for everyone - from the President of France to Donald Rumsfeld to the anti-war protesters - to repent for failing to support the Iraqi people in their desire to get to this point.

j.hari@independent.co.uk