Should I Stay or Should I Go? - 9 August 2002

When I was a little boy - I must have been about six - I was taken, for the first time, to the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool, which for newcomers to the wonders of the British Isles is described by my guidebook as one of the most popular watering places and sea-bathing resorts in the north of England, with a fine esplanade, three piers, a winter garden, an Eiffel tower - 520 ft high - a gigantic wheel, three theatres, the Alhambra - varieties, huge ballroom, et cetera, et cetera.

When I was a little boy - I must have been about six - I was taken, for the first time, to the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool, which for newcomers to the wonders of the British Isles is described by my guidebook as one of the most popular watering places and sea-bathing resorts in the north of England, with a fine esplanade, three piers, a winter garden, an Eiffel tower - 520 ft high - a gigantic wheel, three theatres, the Alhambra - varieties, huge ballroom, et cetera, et cetera.

That seems pretty accurate to me - accurate, that is, to the Blackpool I first knew.

My guidebook is by the publisher who in those days put out the best guide books to just about everywhere.

Thirty-six countries are covered in the end papers of my edition. Which is - let's see - published and edited by Karl Baedeker, and the date - 1906.

Well quite a few et ceteras have been added since then and the 1950 guide lists as "manifold attractions" a park with tennis courts, four golf courses - and on the south shore a pleasure beach.

Well the Pleasure Beach - or what Americans call an amusement park - is here described as Britain's Coney Island.

America's Coney Island, by the way, is a tatty relic of what was once the New Yorkers' most popular pleasure beach, but for 60-odd years they've had the comparative grandeur of Jones Beach - a public park of Olympian dimensions stretching a mile or two alongside the Atlantic Ocean.

In its time the Blackpool Pleasure Beach boasted of having imported all the latest daredevil features from America by way of switchbacks, water chutes, bump'ems, houses of nonsense and side shows.

Never a one for turning myself upside down and being hurled uphill and downhill at 80 miles an hour, I was most fascinated by the side shows.

Until I was six years of age I never knew there was such a thing as a bearded lady, or a man with two heads - I saw him.

But my favourite, which I subsequently visited many times, was a large booth with a banner flaunted on the outside proclaiming that 15 minutes from now would be the last performance today - a re-staging of the battle of the Monitor and Merrimack.

What that could be I couldn't imagine. Even though I'm told there was a subtitle painted under the blazing title which said something about the first duel in history between ironclads.

Anyway what I remember was thrilling and stayed in my memory more thrilling than anything I'd seen in the movies - which, remember, at that time were silent.

Once about 30 people had been packed inside this booth the lights went down, flash lights came up, to light up a small stage, pretty rudimentary.

It had a painted backdrop of a rolling ocean and sliding in front of it was a battleship - the first ironclad. It was a very effective piece of sliding cardboard.

There was an explosion which at once threw a cloak of smoke over the audience. From the other side slid in another smaller cardboard ironclad.

From the big one came another blast of fire and smoke and then the little cardboard responded with an uproar of shots and explosions and such an all-suffocating blast of smoke that as the man cried "That's it folks", we could barely stagger our way of into the ozone of the beach.

I had no idea then or for years who was doing what to whom and why.

I gathered it was a naval battle but was astonished to discover years later that it was the most famous naval battle of the American civil war.

What the Blackpudlians thought they were doing playing a sham re-run of an American naval battle I'll never know.

The actual battle, 1862 - which was watched by thousands of civilians lining the Virginia shore - was being fought, everybody thought, by the Northern army's little Monitor to sink or disable the South's ironclad - the larger Merrimack - in order to break the blockade of goods - mainly cotton - sailing from America to Britain.

This battle didn't quite manage it and was not by a long shot the most decisive naval battle of the war, but it was the first battle ever fought between ironclad men-of-war and so takes a stand in naval history as the Wright Brothers put-puttering through the air for 40 yards in North Carolina take their place in the history of human flight.

And why do I take up this oddity to talk about?

Partly because last week up from the Atlantic Ocean, where it had sunk, the Navy dredged up the Monitor.

Why? I don't know.

It is acknowledged by one and all to be a tremendous engineering feat. Maybe they'll scrape off the barnacles and gussy it up in general and put it on display again, along with the bearded lady and the man with two heads.

But I have to confess that I seized on this story for the obvious, vivid, boyhood connection but only partly.

Partly or perhaps mainly because I was hoping to avoid talking about topic A, which has to be talked about.

The topic is, of course, Iraq and what to do about Saddam Hussein.

The choice that faces President Bush, his advisers, the Congress and ultimately the American people is between leaving Saddam Hussein to his own devices and hope for the best or somehow anticipate and prevent those devices which include conquering his neighbours, getting to the Gulf and seizing, through Kuwait and later Saudi Arabia, Europe's oil supply.

And why should he be able, as only one Middle Eastern power, to do these things?

He is uniquely dangerous because he has developed chemical and biological weapons and he is not scrupled in subduing and killing hundreds of thousands of Kurds.

As for his having no direct connection with 11 September that may be granted so long as it's also noted that he has promised to liberate Jerusalem, that he promptly pays out a congratulatory bounty to the families of suicide bombers, that by making up to old enemies like Iran and Syria he hopes to demonstrate that he is the saviour of the Arab world against the satanic United States.

The problem of what to do came up unfortunately like a tornado more than a thunderstorm because of, as I mentioned last time, the wholly lamentable leak and therefore public awareness of the Pentagon's contingency plans for Iraq.

The Pentagon, like the defence or war department of every big country on earth, has locked away horrendous battle plans for the worst thing that could possibly happen to it but thank the Lord they're not given out to the newspapers.

I sat last week through seven hours of the Senate foreign relations committee hearings.

The witnesses who came to testify, I must say, knew more about Iraq in general and the recent doings of Saddam Hussein than anyone I can think of and among the most impressive was the long-suffering Richard Butler, who quite aside from having been an assassination target, spent more time trying to inspect the landscape of Iraq than anyone on earth and year after year was harassed, stalked and always stopped from examining any terrain which he knew very well covered a hidden laboratory, plutonium stockpile, any element or ingredient of many known poisons.

Now Saudi Arabia, the main base for the Gulf War, refuses to let itself be used as a base of action for a new war.

And Germany and France have joined the rising chorus of possible allies that say they can support no war not sanctioned by the United Nations.

Alas, the retreat to the United Nations has become the easy cop out, the seemingly honourable sanctuary for any nation that doesn't want to fight for other reasons.

Sanctions are always the recommended prescription but sanctions are the most easily avoided and evaded of all punishments.

Nobody, in theory, wants peace more than the United Nations, which swore in its charter 57 years ago "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".

Yet, since it doesn't have an international army, there have been lamentable wars since the signing of the charter by those 51 original, optimistic nations in San Francisco who promised then "as soon as possible" to offer to a United Nations standing armed force whatever it could best supply by way of weapons, tanks, aeroplanes, infantry, material, supplies, even rights of passage.

Nobody ever pledged a pop gun.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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