Despite the protestors' enthusiasm, the world is better off without Saddam

Marches against the war were held across the world that weekend. Later that same week David Aaronovitch in The Guardian asked the marchers:

What are you going to do when you are told - as one day you will be - that while you were demonstrating against an allied invasion, and being applauded by friends and Iraqi officials, many of the people of Iraq were hoping, hope against hope, that no one was listening to you?

The question of course, was never answered.

Since 11 September 2001, Bush and Osama Bin Laden have been described as doppelgangers and the CIA, we were told, created Saddam. Harold Pinter has described the US as “a country run by criminals” and called Tony Blair a “hired Christian thug”, and John Pilger saw parallels between the United States and the Germany of the 1930s. Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said exaggerated wildly and been believed.

Terrorists in post-war Iraq have become “resistance fighters”, like they were an Arabic version of the French resistance and the Americans like the Germans. A schadenfreude infects reporting on US casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, like a spiteful “I told you so!” Meanwhile, Michael Moore, with Stupid White Men, cheerfully appealed to the prejudice of thousands of Europeans and Australians. Clearly, the West faces the War on Terror divided; Sir Joseph Mainwaring’s “new spirit abroad” is not replicated today.

On the same day that Heath Ledger took to the Melbourne streets to protest the war, British Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins spoke to his battalion on the Iraq/Kuwait border:

We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.

He closed with the line “As for ourselves, let’s bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there. Our business now is north.” At least the spirit is found where it is needed most.