It's all just so damn depressing.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Jonathan Freedland: War is not inevitable

What should opponents of the war, and doubters, do now? They might be tempted to give up, as if the argument has already been lost. That would be premature. Even if Washington (and perhaps London) has made up its mind - George Bush was drumming his fingers on the desk yesterday, saying "time is running out" - the rest of the world has not. France, from its current perch in the chair at the UN security council, is promising to lead the coalition of the unwilling. "We are mobilised, we believe war can be avoided," said French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin yesterday, launching his bid to become the George Galloway of international diplomacy. Public opinion has hardly been lost either: on the contrary, as the Guardian's own poll laid bare yesterday, outright opposition to war all but commands a majority in Britain.

What's more, the arguments against immediate war remain robust. First, to take on this enemy at this moment is a gross error of priorities. Surely the more pressing threat to our security - confirmed by every new arrest of suspects or discovery of poison in our own country - comes from the terrorists of al-Qaida. Officials in the Bush administration, and in Whitehall for that matter, like to insist that they can walk and chew gum at the same time: that they can take on Saddam without taking their eye off the ongoing battle against Osama bin Laden and his followers. But experience suggests otherwise. One veteran of the Clinton White House admits that, during the Kosovo war of 1999, that conflict was "the only show in town". There are only so many hours in the day and "all the meetings, all the phone calls, all the faxes" were taken up with fighting Slobodan Milosevic: there was no room for anything else. Despite the bogus attempt to pretend the two tasks are intertwined - with Baghdad somehow a front in the war on terror - the likelier truth is that energy that should be spent hunting down the men bent on carnage in London, Paris or Chicago is being diverted instead towards the much less urgent threat from Iraq. To govern is to choose, and our governors are choosing badly.

Of course a war against Iraq is not just a foolish diversion from fighting terror, it is a sure-fire way to fuel it. What more vigorous recruiting sergeants for anti-western militant Islamism could Bin Laden have hired than Bush, Blair and their 160,000 troops - westerners invading and occupying an Arab land?