We're not all peaceniks - but you wouldn't know it

The cherry blossoms are out and the B52 bombers are on their way. So whose side are you on, the bombs or the blossoms? That, at least, is the way I interpreted yesterday morning's Thought for the Day on Radio 4 as delivered by Elaine Storkey. A seemingly Edenic existing order was about to be shattered by ordnance dropped (one assumes, almost capriciously) on the innocents of Baghdad. By the afternoon, following Robin Cook's resignation, a senior BBC political correspondent asked the seemingly rhetorical question, "How could the man who invented Labour's ethical foreign policy support such a policy [as Tony Blair's on Iraq]?"

Most Thoughts for the Day and too many reports have been like this. During the same Today programme, introducing an item on the legality of any war against Iraq, John Humphrys added to his introduction that "the legal position won't mean much to those upon whom the bombs may soon be falling". Nor, I guess, to those who may soon be free of Saddamite terror, nor (if you accept even a fraction of Blair's concern) to those who may be spared a future conjunction between anthrax and terrorism. But Humphrys didn't mention them.

In the same way reports from Baghdad have spoken about the fears of ordinary Iraqis, without reminding viewers and listeners that any traceable ordinary Iraqi who was to welcome the possibility of Saddam's removal would end up watching her husband and kids being garrotted down at the HQ of the mukhabarat intelligence service. That may not be a reporting restriction as such, but it is as sure as hell a restriction that is worth reporting.

In fact, with one exception, the impression has been given, on the BBC in particular, that public and expert opinion is strongly and almost exclusively opposed to military action. This expectation has entered the cultural stratum that the majority of broadcasters exist in, and so dominates that it has become that most dangerous of wisdoms - not so much orthodox, as axiomatic.

A senior figure in one broadcasting organisation emailed me a fortnight ago telling me that even to suggest that Blair might have a point about Iraq had "all the young executives in their expensive clothes" behaving as if he'd just broken wind. He wasn't talking about news people, he was talking about everyone.

So, fashion T-shirts argue unilaterally, "No War, Blair Out", women on TV programmes slow handclap the PM, reports from round the country focus without fail on protesters, dissidents and angry Muslim groups. Local news shows you the Muswell Hill anti-war campaigners and features striking schoolkids. Religious leaders are collectively described as being anti-war, as though they had taken a vote, and no one had voted the other way. Jacques Chirac, it is quipped, speaks for the majority of Britons. Email round robins arrive every day arguing that "you can stop war" by signing.

The consequence of this has been to imagine a country in which just about everyone, bar some newspapers and most politicians, is opposed to war. Yet today's poll for the Guardian has the gap between pros and antis at just 6% in favour of the latter. So tell me, do you think that the proportions have been 38% to 44% when discovering the views of the British people? And if not, why not?

There is one exception to the rule that everyone should be against war, whether they be French, Pakistani, Jordanian or British. Nothing could disguise the message coming from Northern Iraq, where real Iraqis and real Kurds live and can speak without being murdered. They want Saddam out, they want him out now, and they want the west to do it. You can complain as much as you like (and often correctly) about the Bush administration, and doubt whether Saddam is really a mate of Osama's, but you cannot escape the desire of Iraqi democrats, liberals, Kurds and Islamists to be free. All you can do is to pretend (as the Thought for the Day preachers almost always do) that you somehow didn't hear them. So I rage at the radio, "Never mind bombs, Elaine, people in Iraq are dying now. Is this some strange form of solipsism you're suffering from in which Iraqis only count as dead if we actually kill them?"

Most of the letters and emails I get are against war. Some are strident, some are abusive, a few are anti-semitic (usually based on the incorrect assumption that since I have a Jewish name I must be pro-Israeli), many are well-argued and demand respect. But mixed in are quite a number from people who I haven't seen for years - surprising people, including some of the more thoughtful celebrities - who, sometimes horrified, find themselves supporting action to remove Saddam.

They may not buy the Bush bill of goods as described, but they sure as hell don't shop at the Chirac Double Standards Emporium either. When resolution 1441 spoke of "serious consequences" for Saddam in not fully complying with its terms (which he manifestly has not) my correspondents did not understand that to mean balloons on the ends of sticks. So they find themselves at odds with the assumptions and prejudices of their friends and colleagues, and seemingly isolated - as though they were in some way eccentric. What Katherine Hamnett T-shirt are they going to wear?

This isn't the way they (or I) would have wanted it. We would have preferred a second resolution, which would have conferred more legitimacy on the war, and (just as important) given a more multilateral dimension to the efforts to rebuild a democratic Iraq after the shooting is over.

Even so, it is one thing (and far from dishonourable) to refuse to support the war because it has not been given the official seal of approval by the UN. It is quite another actively to oppose an operation which will have the effect of removing one of the worst and most violent tyrannies in the world. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs should forget axiomatic wisdom this week, and think like Iraqis.

I would bet most of the peaceniks are just of the bandwagon genre, and once the pendulum swings in this direction, most of those will come to their senses.

There is no such thing as "most of the peaceniks." Their political diversity is more broad based than at any time before. Even after we win a strikingly swift precedent setting victory, they will still be opposed to us having done it. This is because a large portion of the opposition is directed at the cause and not the method. That opposition, comes from every part of the political spectrum, and it is not going to go away because we swiftly kick Saddam's ass with very little loss of human life.

I guess I can't really argue that. Half the country voted for Al Gore! Talk about misplaced causes...

3 posted on 03/18/2003 6:18:48 AM PST by InShanghai (I was born on the crest of a wave, and rocked in the cradle of the deep.)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.