If Kipling could see this...
On the eve of the Iraq war last year I was discussing the upcoming outbreak of hostilities with an English friend of mine. "Did you hear" he asked me "that only 25% of British people are in favour of going to war?" "That's pretty low", I replied. "Too right, that's the 25% who permanently want to go to war, they don't care who it's against."
He was exaggerating but still he had a point. The British are undoubtedly a war-like people. A depressingly high number of them like to wallow in nostalgia for a bygone age when Britania ruled the waves and the sun never set on the British Empire. A large proportion act as if the Second World War only ended yesterday.
Of course the British are not alone in having once had an empire, or in having participated in the struggle against fascist Germany. But what sets the British apart from say, the French, is a detatchment from the awful reality of war. This is one of the advantages of being an offshore island - your wars are fought on someone else's land. The conservative writer Peter Hitchens got it spot on when he described his country as "a virgin in a continent of rape victims."
I'm not saying that the British are hopelessly naive about the reality of war, far from it. Just that they are, as a result of their geography, less well-informed than continental Europeans about the full horrors of conflict and thus less disposed to avoid these horrors at all costs.
The first three wars in which the British participated that I can remember; the Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan, enjoyed widespread support in the UK. There were of course people who opposed British involvement in these conflicts, but they tended to be confined to the far left, anti-everything tendency. The mainstream of British public opinion either backed these wars actively or tacitly acquiesed.
Although very different, each conflict was marked by a clearly understood act of aggression from the soon-to-be enemy - Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Serbia's heavy-handed reaction to Kosovar terrorism and al-Qaida's attack on the US. It wasn't difficult for the government of the day to portray Britain's adversaries as the bad guys. Each time, the British people were told that "something had to be done" against Tyrant X and most of them went along with the "something" as it was done.
Not so the Iraq war. This was the first war I can remember, maybe even the first war ever, which a majority of British people opposed from the outset. The fact that two million marched against the war in London last February is remarkable. The fact that the war hadn't even beugn at that stage makes the figure extraordinary. Clearly opposition to this British war stretches way beyond the anti-everything tendency, through the mainstream left, the centre and even into parts of the right.
Unlike previous conflicts, this one was justified, not by any act of aggression by the proposed enemy, but rather by a supposed future act of aggression. Many British people, already familiar with their prime minister's fondeness for the untrue, were highly sceptical about Saddam's WMD capability from the beginning.
This awakening of anti-war sentiment in a country previously inclined to belligerence is one of the few good tings to have come from this disastrous conflict in the Middle East. It is to be hoped that the next time an American president asks for British support in a war of aggression, the prime minister of the day listens to the people and says "no."