Hope is more than a theological virtue, of course; it is a human instinct, too. For the secular and the religious alike, the season brings confidence that after the darkest and shortest days of the year, when “the world’s sap is sunk”, light and life will return The year’s midnight is past We patch up friendships We telephone distant relatives We exchange greetings with strangers. Last week the lobby journalists asked Mr Blair whether we were at war with Iraq, and he could not answer either It would be pleasant to know. In the meantime I remain a member of the Peace Party led by the right honourable member for Chesterfield..

This was to try to bomb the country to the negotiating table Here the aims are not so clear. What negotiations? Where is the table? We do not even know whether the United Kingdom is at war. At the beginning of the Suez conflict Sydney Silverman asked Anthony Eden whether we were at war with Egypt, and he could not answer. All the historical evidence is that attacks from the air solidify civilian morale and entrench those already in power – even if some evidence is now emerging that the inhabitants of London in the Blitz were not quite the cheerful Cockney sparrows depicted in wartime propaganda films.Though we put in troops on the ground in the Falklands and the Gulf, as the USA did in the Gulf too, both countries are none too keen to do the same in Iraq today, for obvious reasons. Mr Clinton and Mr Blair are reluctant to have their young men killed in any very public manner and for no very good cause. For these reasons alone, if for no others, they would not contemplate providing proper military protection for the inspection teams.The glamorous alternative is to do what the USA did so unsuccessfully in Vietnam (though there were, as we know, ground troops there as well).

If this quietist approach is rejected, the other answer is that, if UN resolutions in respect of Iraq are to be implemented, it should be only through force that is proportionate to the end in view.No one could reasonably expect Mr Butler and his colleagues to put their lives at greater risk than they have been at already. I suspect they are not at all serious about the inspections as such. In the days of the Cold War the iron curtain countries had a word which, when they used it in diplomatic negotiations, they regarded as the supreme insult to the other side: “pretext”, as in “that is a pretext for” whatever it happened to be.Similarly the inspections are a pretext for the air attacks, which have no clear aim other than, by some mysterious process, to remove Mr Saddam and his regime and to replace it with another. But if Mr Clinton and Mr Blair are serious about enforcing the resolutions, they can put some troops in if they first obtain the authorisation of the UN. He was halted by this intervention, and replied rather lamely that he would lift the sanctions.There are two better answers which are both correct. One is that there are circumstances in this life when it is better to do nothing – that what can’t be cured must be endured. Mr Benn was asked by a young Labour member, Mr Christopher Leslie, what he would do.

In the absence of this justification, the only warrant for the bombing would be a resolution of the Security Council, of which three members, France, Russia and China, are opposed to the action. If Mr Blair and Mr Clinton think that with this characteristically canting gesture they will make the Mohammedans less angry, they clearly have not studied, still less absorbed, the teachings of the prophet.There can be no pretence that this action is being taken in self-defence. If it did, Tel Aviv would long ago have been reduced to rubble. The bombing of Iraq is apparently to be stopped (or perhaps suspended) for Ramadan. The consequences were the sanctions, which were unjustifiable except as the crudest of punishments, and the weapons inspections, which had perhaps greater justification, though they would have had more force still had former Australian diplomats such as Mr Richard Butler been poking into the defence arrangements of, among others, Israel, India and Pakistan.What is clear, however, is that, as Mr Benn correctly pointed out in the House on Thursday, the breach of a few UN resolutions does not justify the use of overwhelming air power.