I’m a Drama teacher. What do I know about international politics? What gives me the right to analyse ‘the situation on the ground’ in the Middle East? And I’m an unbeliever, an infidel. With what authority could I confidently predict the reactions of Moslems to Western foreign policy? With no access to a high-tech global network of on-the-spot intelligence reporting, how could I have had the temerity to predict a year ago that the aftermath of the Iraq war would bring escalating chaos? And if it wasn’t apparent to the most powerful men & women in the entire world, how could I have been so very sure that within the year the US/UK coalition would have lost effective authority, military & moral, & the situation in Iraq would be spinning out of control.
Because I read the newspapers. Because I watch & listen to the broadcast news & think about it carefully. Because sometimes I watch documentary films & read books & articles about cultures other than my own & I note the profound differences between them. Because throughout the year I encounter people from profoundly different cultures & I note how their personal aspirations, dreams, fears & joys are much as my own. Because I talk to people in pubs, at parties, in the workplace &, in fundamentally agreeing or disagreeing with them, I build up a picture of the world in which I live. Because I am intelligent enough to make connections between these data & have enough common sense to recognise patterns & to perceive within them the forces of cause & effect.
These are special talents. I am proud to possess them. And I am proud to share them with the millions of plumbers, bus drivers, cardiac surgeons, quantity surveyors, beauticians, parish priests, film stars, district nurses, firefighters, portrait artists, sheep farmers & other humble, ordinary, toiling-moiling, heads-down, anonymous nobodies across the world who came out into the streets weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Because we all made the connections, recognised the patterns & perceived within them the inexorable forces of cause & effect. We were right & the professional politicians were wrong.
We are ruled by stupid, vain, arrogant, purblind, mendacious, shameless, ignorant men. Whether they are mindlessly idealistic or brazenly cynical, ultimately all of them are uncompromisingly ruthless. They know that they are right & they have access to vast resources of human & material destructiveness. At best, they patronise us; at worst, they despise us. And - utilising the well-oiled machinery of Western democratic process - we put them where they are. But so deeply embedded are they in that place to which we sent them that, when we declare, without even a frisson of grim satisfaction, WE TOLD YOU SO, they won’t hear a whisper.
