The bad faith of the anti-war movement is revealed in what it doesn't say. For all its apparent self-confidence, the Left, reinforced by a small army of bishops, mullahs and retired generals, lacks the nerve to state that the consequence of peace is the ruin of the hopes of Iraqi democrats. The evasion is on a Himalayan scale. Unsurprisingly, the religious, with centuries of training in casuistry, are the most adept dodgers of the uncomfortable question: how can the peoples of Iraq overthrow their tyrant without foreign help? Many pious men and women signed the declaration of Pax Christi, the 'International Catholic Movement for Peace', which was presented to Downing Street last week. If the Prime Minister read it, he would have noted that in only one sentence did they accept that Iraq was a prison state. 'The people of Iraq,' Pax Christi said, 'must not be made to suffer further because they are living under a dictator who in his early years in power enjoyed the collusion and support of Western nations.' Pax Christi deserves credit for its scanty acknowledgement - Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford, managed to oppose war for 1,000 words on these pages last Sunday without once alluding to the nature of the Iraqi regime. But I would have thought that the dopiest theologian might have grasped that the people of Iraq are suffering, and will suffer further, precisely because they live under a dictator. The faithful can't say as much because the issue would then become whether the civilian casualties of a war would justify the removal of the oppressor.  As important would be the nature of the new government after the likely victory. The Foreign Office, US State Department and CIA appear to favour the replacement of one goon with another. In that instance, war would probably not be worth fighting. But the moral calculus would change if the West met the demands of the Iraqi National Congress, a loose coalition of Kurdish, Sunni and Shia opposition groups, and for once supported democracy and secularism in the Middle East.  The battle by the INC and others to win American backing for a democratic Iraq is being fought in Washington and London as I write. On Friday Colin Pow ell told opposition leaders 'our shared goal is that the Iraqi people should be free'. Whether his warm words were anything other than propaganda remains to be seen. His State Department had refused to talk to the INC for a year. Meanwhile George Tenet, the director of the CIA who, astonishingly, was not fired for his failure to protect his country on 11 September, has been an unyielding opponent of Iraqi democracy since he advised Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s.  I'm not saying Iraqi opposition is perfect. Generals who want a pro-American dictatorship form a part of it, while the two Kurdish factions in the INC were engaged in a civil war as late as 1996. Nevertheless, the heroism of many dissidents can't be doubted by those who are prepared to do what the Bishop of Oxford won't do and look at Saddam's regime with clear eyes. Among Amnesty International's voluminous accounts of executions and amputations in Iraq are descriptions of the collective punishment of their families. The fate of al-Shaikh Nazzar Kadhim al-Bahadli was   'typical', we are told. His wife, father and mother were tortured in front of him until he confessed to organising protests against Saddam. The latest grim dispatches from Iraq brought news of the execution of Abd al-Wahad al-Rifa'i, a retired teacher, who was suspected of having links to the opposition through his exiled brother.  The opponents of Saddam therefore include many brave men and women who are paying dearly to uphold the values of at least a part of the liberal-Left. They champion human rights and the protection of the Kurdish minority. Yet when they ask their natural allies to pressure Blair into supporting a democratic Iraq they are met with indifference or the preposterous slander that they are the stooges of the CIA.  A part of the explanation for the bad mouthing of freedom fighters lies in the belief that Muslims cannot handle and do not want freedom. On Friday yet another bishop - Colin Bennetts, the Bishop of Coventry, this time - wrote in    the  Guardian  that he opposed war because 'Muslim communities here in the UK would perceive a UK attack on Iraq as evidence of an in-built hostility to the Islamic world'. I bow before the Right Reverend's superior knowledge of the views of the superstitious, but can't for the life of me understand why he believes the rejection of appeals from Muslims for help in removing a secular dictator is anti-Islamic.  The greater reason for hostility is the ground shared by Left and Right. Noam Chomsky and his supporters have become the mirror image of the hypocrisies of American power. If the US encourages the persecution of Palestinians, but belatedly fights against Serbian ethnic cleansing, they will support freedom in the West Bank but not in the Balkans. In Britain the supposed extremes have gone a stage further and merged. It was as predictable as Christmas that the voices of Douglas Hurd and Sir Michael Rose would be among the loudest crying to leave Saddam alone.  As Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the former Polish Prime Minister, said of the struggle to persuade Europe to stop Milosevic: 'Any time there was a likelihood of effective action, Hurd intervened to prevent it.' Rose, while refusing to contemplate decisive intervention by his troops in Bosnia, decided that denunciations of the rape and murder of Muslims were the work of 'the powerful Jewish lobby', and chummily regarded General Ratko Mladic, the butcher of Srebrenica, as a fellow officer 'who generally kept his word'.  Both have warned that an invasion of Iraq will destabilise neighbouring states. By this they must mean the theocracy of Saudi Arabia. You might have thought the prediction that war would set on fire a repellent Saudi monarchy whose religious police terrorise the population - and which sponsored the most brutal version of Islamic fundamentalism until one minute to midnight on 10 September - would have been met with the cry 'let it burn'.  But the Left appears as anxious to keep the lid on popular fury in the region as the Right. In their Commons motion, which is rallying Labour opposition, Tam Dalyell and Alice Mahon write, 'an aggressive war by Britain and the US would destabilise Iraq, risk provoking further conflict in the region and, inevitably, alienate the Arab states'.  There are honourable grounds for upholding the authority of the United Nations and opposing American global domination. What is dishonourable - indeed insufferable - is the pretence of everyone from Trots to archbishops that their animating concern is the sufferings of the peoples of Iraq.      More from <B>Nick Cohen</B> on Iraq's democrats and Iraq and the Left at www.observer.co.uk/iraq