Iraq

We've just had the five year anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq and a curse on the houses of all the journalists who are using the word 'invasion' now that it's gone so horribly wrong and that public opinion is so much against it, but didn't use it five years ago.

Five years ago a group of boys on a train pinned me up against the wall because they could see from my black arm band that I had been at a demonstration protesting the War. One of them said 'How are you going to feel if that fucker Hussein does have weapons? You're going to be responsible for all the babies that die.' Everyone from undergraduate history students up knew that the War would make the world more dangerous, not less dangerous, especially if Iraq really did have nuclear weapons.

At the time I was teaching poetry to first year undergraduates and I made them read Wilfred Owen; a class full of kids who thought we should be at war berated me for my ghoulishness in turning their stomachs with Owen's descriptions of the war dead.

Just recently, an American friend of mine looked confused when I said that the upcoming election was in the context of America being at war. Then he said '...Oh! you mean Iraq? Most Americans don't think of us as being at war.' I told him, in my insufferably self-righteous way, that most Iraqis do think of America as being at war.

Our attitude to war is only maintained by the absence of wars at home, which is what Owen, who died in the Battle of Sambre a week before the war ended, meant when he said that anyone who had seen or heard what he had would not urge war. My great uncles, who signed up underage like so many Australia boys, were POWs in Changi and the Burma Railway and it broke them. But believe me, it made pacifists of them.

The best reason not to vote for McCain is that he is a man who fought in Vietnam, was captured and tortured, and still believes that the war in Iraq will achieve any worthwhile purpose. I cannot imaging the depths of the kind of pathology that would drive a man to such a delusion.