I am reading Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday. I am not finished with it, so please don’t spoil the ending. However I am a little over half way through and I was surprised by a passage that I will attempt to put into some context. The novel follows one Henry Perowne, neurosurgeon, on a Saturday in February before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is the day of the largest London demonstration against the impending war in Iraq. Perowne, though concerned with the state of the world, is far more interested in making it to his weekend squash game than protesting.

Though not directly involved in the demonstration, he sees the march from the periphery. He is inconvenienced by the street closings (one of these closings leads to him getting mugged). The tension in the very air makes him consider the case for war. He summarizes the issues thus:

“The UN is predicting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths. There could be revenge attacks on London. And still the Americans remain vague about their post-war plans. Perhaps they have none. In addition, Saddam could be overthrown at too high a cost. It’s a future no one can read. Government ministers speak up loyally, various newspapers back the war, there’s a fair degree of anxious support in the country along with the dissent, but no one really doubts that in Britain one man alone is driving the matter forward.” McEwan, Saturday (2005) p. 147

That one man was Tony Blair. McEwan, in a careful summary, shows us many of the questions that were raised in all of our minds before we got involved in the War in Iraq. This is not a work of hindsight either. These are accurate statements that summarize the issues being posed before the invasion and are a direct refutation to the ignorance defense given by politicians explaining their early support for the conflict.

As much as we are diluted by the “if we knew then what we knew now” talk by Presidential aspirants or from poll watching politicians, the fact is that there were plenty of people raising doubts about this war from the beginning. It is impossible for me to accept the ignorance excuse. Either they went along with the President because they were afraid of the political ramifications if it turned out well, or, they have horrendous judgment and absolutely no foresight. It was there job to ask the right questions and they simply didn’t do it.

There were plenty of people who didn’t buy it. Most weren’t in a position to do anything about it.

The intelligence wasn’t that convincing anyway. When Colin Powell spoke to the UN, I was sitting around with the rest of my office watching the presentation of the slam dunk case for war. We were all Republican congressional staffers and interestingly, we were all skeptical of going to war. We had been reading lots of briefing materials for our boss, talking points reiterating the official line, and there was a lot more smirking at this stuff than there was an actual belief that Saddam was a legitimate threat.

After Powell finished, we looked around each other and said, practically in unison, “that’s it?” From the Sunday morning talk shows all the way down to the editorials in local papers, the public got the feeling that this thing was inevitable, and we might as well back the right side, lest we be thought of as something less than American. If ever there was a more unpatriotic zeitgeist it was the casual and apathetic acceptance of this war from the very beginning.

McEwan’s book, published in 2005 but written during the early days of the Iraqi War but it is a reminder that there were millions of people who didn’t buy it. Moreover, it isn’t hindsight to say that some got it right, and not by accident.