Diary – 19 April 2003

If I meet one more smug, smirking pro-war protagonist who greets me with that ‘Hey, peacenik – you must feel a right prat’ look, I fear I shall arm myself with a few of those elusive WMDs and take out whole swaths of Wapping, Kensington and Downing Street. If there’s one thing worse than the world’s most powerful military force waging an unlawful, unethical war against a clapped-out old tyrant’s ragbag excuse for an army, then it’s surely the quite absurd rash of gloating and triumphalism that has engulfed large parts of our country. I am all for saluting the efficiency and bravery of the armed forces in doing their job, but did anybody really ever doubt that we’d win the military conflict? Do we cheer when Australia thrash Bangladesh at cricket, or throw street parties when Brazil drub Lithuania at football? A senior commander of the SAS in the last Gulf war told me last summer that the allies had virtually wiped out Saddam’s infamous Republican Guard in 1991 and any fight with them now would be laughably one-sided. This was confirmed by one of our own Marines who described a tank battle with a renegade Iraqi mob outside Basra as ‘like pitting Ferraris against Austin Allegros’. My SAS friend also assured me that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and that there could be no credible link with bin Laden, because Osama hates Saddam even more than we do. Extreme Islamic fundamentalists may loathe us democratic Christian infidels, but apparently what they really despise are lapsed Muslim despots with a penchant for palaces, Phantom Rolls-Royces and prostitutes. No, this war was about George Bush giving America a scalp for 9/11, warning real menaces like North Korea to watch their step, and securing new oil reserves big enough to stop the Saudis dictating the global economies; probably in that order.