Sexed-up pacifism

Big-screen documentaries never change the world. Blackfish has not shortened the queues to see maltreated killer whales leap through hoops at SeaWorld. Super Size Me reduced neither the all-American waistline nor the profit margin of McDonald’s. The Cove did not prevent the Japan whale industry slaughtering dolphins. So what possible chance, more than a decade after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, has a mere film of bringing about that most chimerical of holy grails: an admission that the case for invading Iraq was knowingly built on a lie?

We Are Many revisits the anti-war marches of 15 February 2003. On that date there were demonstrations in 789 cities across 72 countries, plus Antarctica, attended by many millions of people of all ages, creeds and colours, none of them frightfully persuaded by the neocon project — eventual cost: $6 trillion — to give that goddamn Saddam a biff on the conk.

In this powerful account of the epic failure of public opinion — and of the House of Commons — the usual suspects say their piece about peace. There’s the estimable Jerry Corbyn, Noam Chomsky, the late Tony Benn, Jesse Jackson, Clare Short, Ken Loach and Tariq Ali. The self-beatifying Sir Richard Branson very nearly saved the world by laying on a secret plane to fly Mandela to Baghdad to talk Saddam into exile. And joining the ranks of statutory thespians and many weeping peace activists are Messrs Albarn and Eno.

‘I feel that I speak for a growing number of people in this country,’ Damon Albarn, descended from a long line of conchies, told a news crew at the time. If it had been Noel Gallagher, the Britpopper who once went to drinkies at No. 10, maybe Blair would have listened. Brian Eno recalled writing to the government requesting a copy of the sexed-up dossier, though not in that exact wording.