I am sure that the hon. Member for Glasgow, Hillhead (Mr. Galloway) is passionately sincere, but the somewhat hysterical character of some of his remarks has not made it easier for me to support, as I fully intend to do, the main tenor of the argument of the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell). The fact that the Opposition Back Benches are occupied almost entirely by hon. Members who have taken an uncritical attitude of opposition to almost any use of armed force by Her Majesty's Government does not make my task any easier. There is a conspicuous absence of those who may be called moderates on the Labour Back Benches.

I am glad to have the opportunity to make a small contribution to the debate. The hon. Member for Linlithgow has done the House and the nation a service by focusing attention on this issue and by setting out so vividly and in such detail the scale of the ecological and environmental consequences of the Gulf war. He knows the high personal regard which I have for him. I cannot always follow him in his battles—sometimes they seem to be battles against windmills. I usually part company from him sharply when he pursues, as he rather notably did not do today, the conspiracy theory of history. I am a devout believer in the cock-up theory.

As it happens, I believe that the Government have done well in their action to help clear up—perhaps that is not the right expression for putting a sticking-plaster on a gaping arterial wound—after the war. At any rate they have done well by rushing like Mrs. Partington with her mop vigorously pushing back the Atlantic ocean. The Atlantic ocean, as admirers of Sydney Smith will recall, beat Mrs. Partington. If the hon. Gentleman is in the business of blaming the Government for showing less enthusiasm for clearing up the mess than for getting into the war, I am not with him. The action announced by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment on 28 January was prompt and well judged as a contribution to clearing up the most immediate threat to the environment from the conflict—the spreading oil slicks in the Gulf. The effort, prompt as it was, does not begin to match in scale the effort that we put into the war or the real needs of the truly alarming environmental catastrophe. That, alas, mirrors human attitudes. It is easier to get massive support for a war than for cleaning up its aftermath.

Heaven knows, I did not want to get into the war. Even now I am not finally convinced that it was the lesser of two evils. It is just that I was driven to the conclusion that it was going to happen anyway because Saddam Hussein was determined to have a war so that he could pose as the Arab champion against Israel. If it was going to happen anyway, there was no realistic possibility of making it less awful by delaying it. It was the much criticised last-minute efforts at mediation by France and the Soviet Union which eventually convinced me that war was inevitable.

Just because I have no fault to find with the Government, either in their conduct of the war or in their response to the ecological catastrophe which has, entirely predictably, ensued, it does not mean that any of us can sit back and say, "We have done what needed to be done." Far from it. It is to public opinion in this country and the world outside that we need to address our warnings insistently and stridently.

The damage done by allied air action in Iraq and still more by the Iraqi scorched earth policy in Kuwait is irreparable. The most enormous efforts are called for from the world community even to mitigate the worst effects of that damage. To make matters worse, these efforts are called for at a time when famine once again threatens great swathes of Africa and the many millions of men, women and children who live there. The efforts that must be made to limit the damage in the middle east must be in addition to, not in place of, the efforts that the rich world makes to alleviate famine in Africa.

No hon. Member wants war. I wish I could say the same of the press, but I have found it hard to read The Sunday Times or The Sunday Telegraph, let alone the Sunday Express, The Sun or The Star without sensing a real relish for battle. I cannot avoid the feeling that even among the more responsible people, such as hon. Members who certainly did not want a war, there has been insufficient appreciation of how horrible war is. Because of that insufficient appreciation, I am not sure that in balancing the pros and cons of recourse to armed force, we necessarily came to the right conclusion. Yes, of course war brings out some heroic qualities of courage and self-sacrifice, but so do concentration camps. I hope that we will not start romanticising them.

It is a matter for rejoicing that the casualties on the allied side were so light, but the casualties on the Iraqi side were appalling. As the hon. Member for Linlithgow said, many of us will be haunted for the rest of our lives by the pictures of the carnage on the Basra road. I have no right to condemn the military action which produced that slaughter any more than I had a right to condemn the bombing of Dresden in 1945 or the dropping of the second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. All three are copybook examples of the senseless butchery which war almost invariably brings in its train. When we weigh up whether in any given situation war is the lesser of two evils, we should recognise that such horrors are inseparable from it.