Philosopher Ted Honderich argues there are at least seven complex and intertwined reasons for the fighting in Iraq

IT is a mark of New Labour’s concentration on its careerism to the exclusion of actual thinking about things, that at bottom it gave one compelling reason for attacking Iraq, the need of pre-emptive self-defence, saving us from what could happen in 45 minutes.
Has there ever been any war in history that had only one true explanation or cause?
The question is like the question of whether a match has ever lit only because it was struck.
We know the answer is no, because damp matches and matches out of oxygen do not light. We know too that in general human motivation is mixed.
The government’s simplicity in its explanation of why it was going to war was a bad model.
It led too many other people to say the cause was just oil or whatever. But all of us, when we are thinking and are not ordinary politicians, know things are not simple.
One large motivation on the part of Mr Blair and Mr Brown, who were in it together, was alliance with America.
This is not only to say alliance with the people to which we are related by language, history and some culture. The alliance was with the remaining super power and, still more importantly, it was ideological.
It was with the most complete example of an economic, political and social system.
That is, the system of demands for external rather than internal incentives and property freedom, and hierarchic democracy instead of democracy and cheap equalities.
A second motivation was to make a further and general preventive response, beyond the attack on Afghanistan, to the possibility of more attacks prefigured by 9/11.
This response did not in fact require the truth of what was pretended, if not so absurdly as in America, which was a collaborative connection of Iraq to 9/11.
A third explanation was the advancing of the principal cause of neo-conservatives in and around the United States government. This was neo-Zionism, the violation of Palestine beyond the 1967 borders of Israel.
A fourth element in the war was a perception of the self-interests of Britain and America, things separable from just a strategic alliance, advancing an ideology, and deterring the terrorism on the other side.
This self-interest, certainly on the part of the United States, had much to do with the essential commodity of oil. Fifth, there were personal motivations, the careerism of a Prime Minister of passion within the limited horizons and education of only a lawyer, his careerism being a fitting counterpart to the determination of an ignorant president who was the son of a president who had left unfinished business behind him.
Perhaps, sixthly, there was what was called a motive of humanitarian intervention in the war and the rescuing of some part of a people from a dictatorship with a record of savagery. The weight or size assigned to this cause must be the result of considering other cases of international inaction and omission.
Seventh, there was the entwining of corporations with the American government, the policy of defending and opening up business possibilities by means of war.
Such an account of the causation and motivation with respect to the war on Iraq may not be much disputed, except in politics. In better intellectual company, only the hard and indeed philosophical question of the weighting of the elements of explanation is in dispute. What are the consequences of such an account for the question of the nature of New Labour? What follows from the fact that the 45-minute lie or culpable self-deception was put in its place as the explanation?
You are not required, as a Prime Minister, always to tell the truth. You can indeed lie to save your country. You can lie to protect the life of a spy. However, you cannot lie to suck up to an hegemony stupid in its ignorance. Nor can you lie to forward an ideology, a matter of passion in ideas.You cannot lie to try to have a place in history. Those are situations in which you cannot lie. They can come together in one.
There are related facts. One is that democracy has no need of a ferret at the despatch box. Another is that you can conduct yourself in a matter of the utmost seriousness, where lives will certainly be lost and children maimed, by the rules of a courtroom that has no judge. You can, that is, be a democratic politician who acts as an advocate unscrupulous or worse, counting on not being held to account by a judge, and ready with the pitiable excuse that eventually the people will judge. It does not matter to this excuse if the lives will be lost beforehand.
If the governance of a society is not to be placed in the hands of those who remain businessmen, it is not to be placed either in the hands of those who remain in the habits of shysters.

• Ted Honderich is Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London. This argument is taken from his latest book Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? (Pluto Press, £17.99).