London’s Cadogan Hall reached full capacity last night as four senior political figures battled it out in a fierce debate over the motion, ‘The war on terror was the right response to 9/11’, chaired by the BBC’s Zeinab Badawi.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former UK Permanent Representative at the UN in New York, opened for the opposition. He used the failures of the war 10 years on in order to argue that it was not the right response; had it been, Guantanamo bay would be closed, Afghanistan would be a stable environment and Iraq would be a democracy closed to Al Qaeda. The war, he argued, has not diminished the threat of terrorism to the UK or the US. Meanwhile, sympathy for the US has all but evaporated and this is the most telling judgement; their success would have raised worldwide respect, which hasn’t happened. Another of his points, that the root cause of terrorism needs to be considered in order to be alleviated, was picked up by his team mate, Dr Bernard Kouchner, the former Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the French Republic. Dr Kouchner posited that the answer was to economically develop the countries involved. A war on terror, he reasoned, is useless whilst poverty and illiteracy remain unaddressed; instead, it should have been a ‘war on poverty’.

Supporting the motion was ex-President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf and a former member of the Bush administration, Colleen Graffy. The latter chose to take on the familiar argument that law enforcement, not military might, would have been a more appropriate and effective response to the attacks on the Twin Towers. For Graffy, just as with America’s war on drugs, domestic policing could never smother an external threat as pressing as terrorism. General Musharraf chose to tackle another well-trodden argument, that the war on terror has actually contributed to the proliferation of terrorism around the world. He countered that regardless of whether it was effective or not, the war was and remains morally the only right answer to the list of terrorist attacks that led up to and included 9/11. He added that there is no ‘quick fix’; military force is only a short term solution, an instrument required in order to create an environment in which socio-economic and political domains can succeed.

Sir Jeremy was quick to identify Graffy’s rhetoric as a ‘diversion’, and sure enough, Graffy raised some contentious issues. Her belief that the war on terror was the catalyst to the Arab Spring was not wholly supported by Musharraf, whilst her claim that the Bush administration never linked Iraq and the war on terror provoked a howl of indignation from the audience. So contentious was this point, that even Musharraf broke rank and joined Kouchner and Sir Jeremy in refuting that they were linked. As Dr Kouchner put it – yes, Saddam was a butcher of his own people, yet he was not guilty of 9/11 nor was he guilty of possessing weapons of mass destruction.

Pre-debate vote: For- 179 Against- 323 Don’t know- 200
Final vote: For- 276 Against- 402 Don’t know- 42
A clear victory against the motion.