Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/18/2003 4:17:33 PM PDT by MadIvan
On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 9, I watched Saddam's statue lurch sideways, and my fingers itched to pick up the phone. But I didn't give in to the temptation. For the past few weeks, my Left-wing friends and I have operated a non-aggression pact, organised around a simple rule: don't mention the war. This is not out of respect for each other's views. It's because we don't want the police to be called.
It was at a dinner party, inevitably, that the friendship-wrecking potential of the Iraq conflict really sank in. I have known Gregory since the 1980s; he carries off the implausibly postmodern combination of graphic designer and practising Anglican with tremendous panache.
He is almost the wittiest person I know, so I felt a pang of disappointment when he explained why he was going on the peace march. "Dubya is such a moron," he said. In my experience, people who call President Bush "Dubya" tend to be morons themselves - the sort who chortle when they say "Torygraph".
So I replied, in the relaxed, conversational tone I use if I really want to drive someone crazy: "You're playing right into Saddam's hands. The blood of his victims will be on your conscience." Within seconds, we were being pulled apart like boys in the playground by a fellow guest, a Jesuit historian.
Another crisis loomed on the day of the march. I was due to see part one of The Trojans at ENO with Ambrose, a theatre director of irreproachably right-on sympathies. My friendship with Ambrose somehow flourishes despite the fact that, if either of us came to power, we would have the other shot. But it requires a lot of lip-biting and, given that he was planning to go on the march, prior diplomacy was clearly in order.
We hammered out a deal: no crowing, no point-scoring, just Berlioz. As it was, he cheated. The production had ham-fistedly cast the Trojans as the victims of September 11.
"Most bizarre," whispered Ambrose. "The Trojans, for all their faults, possessed a certain nobility, whereas surely most civilised people regard the Americans as our enemies."
As I say, my decision not to pick arguments with my anti-war friends wasn't about agreeing to disagree. It was about not trusting myself not to hit them. I don't include in my condemnation people who opposed the war for honourable reasons; I'm referring to those who flirted with the hate-filled anti-Americanism of the "Not in My Name" lobby, some of whose spokesmen licked their lips in anticipation of the "grave humanitarian crisis" that would follow military intervention.
I stuck to my resolve right throughout the campaign: indeed, if I'm being honest, I was glad of it during the hairy days of late March.
Even in the past week, I've refrained from gloating - partly because I've been nervous of what might happen. The anti-war movement is thrashing around like a wounded dinosaur. In the 1950s, the social psychologist Leon Festinger wrote a book called When Prophecy Fails, a hilarious study of a UFO cult whose world collapsed when a threatened global flood failed to materialise.
He minted the term "cognitive dissonance" to describe the desperate feelings created by the non-fulfilment of prophecy. If you want to observe the agonies of cognitive dissonance, look no further than the inverted commas that Robert Fisk of the Independent placed round the "liberation" of Baghdad in his report last week. I wonder if, like Festinger's cult leader, he wept bitter tears when the apocalypse never came.
It seems heartless as well as dangerous to intrude on such grief. But then, yesterday, I walked into a London bookshop and was greeted with a sight that brought me out in goose-pimples of Schadenfreude.
They were clearing away the Chomsky. Yes, the bar-room bore of the anti-imperialist Left was being eased aside to make room for a big pink pile of chick-lit; and when I asked the assistant why, she said: "Well, we thought that now the war is over..."
And I thought: enough is enough. It's time to crow. Time to stand outside London's Arts Theatre and cackle at the sour-faced Islingtonians trooping in to see a show (written before the war and hastily revised, I gather) called The Madness of George Dubya.
Time to write to the Rt Rev Patrick O'Donoghue, Roman Catholic Bishop of Lancaster, and ask him on what information he based his assertion that "hundreds of thousands of Iraqis" would die in the conflict. Time to cut out Fisky's prophecies of the siege of Baghdad and frame them in the bathroom.
Time to pick up the phone to Gregory and say: "The Iraqi people have been liberated - but not in your name."
Regards, Ivan
Those proud of our American and British heritage have earned the right to say it: The liberation of the Iraqi poeple was in our name.
The torrent of despair from him and his ilk has been inventive: a seemingly endless waterfall of reasons not to go to war, bleatings about 'now we've really pissed off the terrorists!', Bush-Cheny chicanery in business deals post-Saddam, on and on and on.
Today he was reduced to the pathetic "but they've ruined priceless antiquities!"
I looked at him and and said, "In all honesty, when they're taking sniper fire as they free captives taken from Kuwait in 1991 from an underground prison should any reasonable person give a damn about a friggin' vase?!!!!?"
That shut him up
This guy is cool as hell.
"...my decision not to pick arguments with my anti-war friends wasn't about agreeing to disagree. It was about not trusting myself not to hit them."
It doesn't get any better than that. Thankfully, none of my friends are "Not In Our Name" types, so I haven't been in that position. But I can only imagine what it must be like to be a pro-Bush Brit or European. If it wasn't for the Telegraph and the Sun, I would almost refuse to believe that such a person exists.
Conservatives keep slamming the press for its negative coverage of the war. But the real problem is that hawks sold the country an easy war.
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.