The Appetite for War - 14 November 2003

A year or two after the end of the First World War - I should say by the mid 1920s - a phrase came into popular usage which today sounds frightful, incredibly callous, but at the time was not even thought cynical.

It was a jocular remark, usually about a friend who'd had the luck to be well out of combat, assigned to a base camp or perhaps to an army post overseas in a city far beyond the noise of shot and shell.

I think of an old friend of mine who had such an assignment during the Second War and when I asked him where he'd served, he replied with this old familiar phrase: "Well, I had rather a good war really."

How could we, only a year or two after the First War over, how dare we even whisper such a phrase, in the knowledge of eight million dead and 20 million wounded?

Ah, but there's the point - in the knowledge - we didn't have the knowledge. We had no idea of the appalling numbers, of the enormity of the slaughter.

We, the people at home, even the people living on the South Coast of England, friends in Kent for instance, who could hear the booming din of the guns when the wind was right, even they had only two sources for a guess at the number of casualties in any given battle, the constant sub-title in the morning paper - "heavy casualties on both sides" - and the evidence of their own eyes when they came to notice, in the weeks after an end or a pause in a battle, to notice how many young women out on the streets were wearing black, how many middle-aged and old men had black armbands.

An old friend of mine, a very sophisticated man, when I told him that we never read or otherwise knew about the number of casualties in any engagement, he astonished me by being astonished.

"But why?" he said.

This little exchange came on the heels of a running discussion of whether we, the people of the United States, could maintain our support of the war, of any war, since we abolished the ban on military information that has been maintained in all wars before Vietnam - namely strict, absolute, frontline censorship.

Add to that the most decisive factor of all today in the public judgement of any political event: the existence of television.

Back in the First War we saw no corpses, no wounded children, no bombing of houses. We had no TV, no radio, only the papers.

And the Second War too, we had an iron censorship - no television.

The only pictures we had of war were the movie theatre newsreels and, though we saw long shots of desolate, tree-broken landscapes, we did not see hundreds of bodies skewered on stretches of barbed wire.

We saw surrendering Germans of course but mostly we saw men huddled in trenches putting their thumbs up for the cameras, or scenes of marching men lighting cigarettes and singing in cheerful unison: "As long as you've a Lucifer to light your fag smile, boys, that's the style."

So while the other day a national poll found that to 70% of the American people a casualty list in Iraq of over 500 dead is "unacceptable", we found that in the Battle of the Somme, when there were 20,000 of our men dead after the first night's fighting and 400,000 at the battle's end, these figures were "acceptable" because we never knew about them until five or six years after the whole war was over.

And when the official figures were first published the human horror of them spawned in Britain and Germany, especially, a literature of bitterness and disillusion, which in time came to be tempered by hope in the newly-created League of Nations, which the good President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Minister Lloyd George assured us offered a blueprint, a road map, to perpetual peace.

And we all, for a decade or so, clung desperately to this Utopian hope in spite of the League's having no international force to stop any war.

Fifty years after the creation of the League of Nations - which was successively humiliated by Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin - the United States found itself deep in a war, which France had abandoned, against Communist guerrillas in Vietnam.

During the 58 years since the founding of the United Nations - which also, without possessing a pop gun, was created in its own words "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" - there have been over 250 wars and the United States now finds itself in a burgeoning war against a worldwide enemy of terrorist guerrillas.

Six months after President Bush pronounced the Iraq mission accomplished, we've discovered that the war was not the war, but only the first battle of the war.

The widespread disillusion this time has frozen the public reaction into two or three over-simple, unhelpful, public attitudes.

And I'm not using the word public about America only. By now the American public shares the disappointments, the anxieties and the large population of the war's opponents as the rest of Europe, if not the wholesale detestation of the United States which we're reliably told infests the Muslim world.

Surprisingly it came out the other day that - after his whirlwind world tour to talk foreign policy, to test nuclear intentions, to discuss trade, to beg for allies from several nations - the surprising word from the White House official who went along with him was that Mr Bush was astonished to hear that, in much of the world, America is unpopular as never before.

Which left some American correspondents abroad, and those of us who depend on them, reeling with disbelief.

Where had Mr Bush been? Well the answer is, I'm afraid, not hard to seek.

When he's abroad he's fenced off from the inhabitants, embedded in a shoulder to shoulder regiment of bodyguards.

If it's Thursday, he must say, it must be London.

And when he's at home he's most of the time in the gilded cocoon of the White House - that elegant American Versailles inhabited only by deferential courtiers and by one or two realists (Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld comes to mind) who break the bad news gently and reluctantly.

Surely Mr Bush has access to the polls? And lately his stock has been going down slowly but cruelly. There is still a majority in favour of trying to stay there and stabilise Iraq but it withers a little every day.

As you'll have noticed, it has been the burden of this and earlier talks to wonder how long the American people - not to mention the British, the Polish, the Spanish, the Italians and the Australians will stay the course if war means what it has normally meant: 20,000, 30,000 even 100,000 casualties.

Is such stamina possible for America and Western Europe in which now three generations have seen no war, no hard times, no need to sacrifice, have lived by a constitution that is all about rights and nothing about duty, nations that have found peace and comfort not only agreeable but normal?

I notice that more and more friends of mine who originally supported going into Iraq alone now say they were really against it from the start.

They had the good fortune not to be journalists and so have no printed record to refute them.

During the past month or so I've been asking people of many sorts - including a top United Nations delegate, a philosopher, people who were against the war - what would they have done if they'd had a vote on the Security Council. What would they have done other than going it alone or accepting a UN resolution to send in inspectors for three months more and warned Saddam, as we've done 16 times before, to obey or face serious consequences? They all said: "Back to the UN."

So 250 United Nations inspectors would have gone back - if Saddam had let them. As it is, the United States went in and after six months it has had 1200 inspectors at work.

Rarely, I believe, has an American president approached such a heartbreaking visit to Europe and never, surely, to an ally.

For Mr Bush - this imagined conqueror and bully who covets not an acre of land - is truly naïve enough to believe deeply that democracy can be planted in the alien cultures of Arabia.

I had an odd, touching phone call two days ago from a London reporter.

What was the president going to say?

I hadn't the remotest idea.

What would I say? - presuming, I suppose, that I was his speechwriter.

I was not trapped.

But I think I would say: Be of good heart and remember, if you value peace over freedom, you will lose.

And as a famous British author wrote, fleeing his luxurious French estate as the Nazis swept in: "If it is comfort or money that you value more, you will lose that too."

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