ON May 21 an extraordinary film about the Stop the War protests of Feb. 15, 2003 was streamed by satellite to cinemas across the United Kingdom and followed by an impassioned live “Q and A” conducted by Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow.
Directed by the British Iranian filmmaker, Amir Amirani, and eight years in the making, We Are Many is a powerful reminder of the global dimensions of the protests. Its many unforgettable images include the protesters in Antartica who lay down to form a circle on the ice and the “No to War” slogan that intrepid campaigners painted in red across the lofty facade of the Sydney Opera House.
Amirani mixes archive footage with the testimony of Stop the War organizers, critics of the war such as the novelist John le Carre and key players in the diplomatic drama that preceded it — among them the Swedish weapons inspector Hans Blix, whose non-discovery of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction maddened the White House, and the British chairman of the Virgin Group, Richard Branson, who, in a last ditch effort to avert war, attempted to fly Nelson Mandela to Baghdad with the aim of persuading Saddam Hussein to go into exile.
Perhaps the most telling contribution comes from Lawrence Wilkerson, formerly US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff. Wilkerson is scathing about the manner in which Washington and a servile US media encouraged Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. He is scathing too about the “hoax” perpetrated by Colin Powell with his slick televised “demonstration” that WMD sites were scattered around Iraq. Here is a sometime Washington insider who makes no secret of his abiding outrage about the war, his sense that its duplicitous protagonists deserve to face justice.
The film underlines how widely shared was Wilkerson’s skepticism about the case made for toppling Saddam Hussein by US president George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Few doubted that the Iraqi leader was a monster but thinking people throughout the world believed that invading Iraq not only lacked moral and legal justification but portended appalling consequences. The film does not fight shy of asserting that public opinion has been all too amply vindicated, with Iraq and the wider Middle East plunged into unending turmoil by an American president whose ignorance of foreign affairs in general and of Islam in particular might be considered a crime in its own right.
In a chilling sequence, Bush is seen delivering a joshing address to a black tie dinner against a backdrop of photographs of him skittishly scouring the Oval Office for something he cannot find. The film sets his tasteless attempt (in 2004) to make a joke out of the US failure to find WMD against scenes of horror from Iraq. Many viewers of the film will be afresh that Bush and Blair alike could pose as champions of civilization even as they unleashed death and destruction and road roughshod over international law.
Blair declined to be interviewed by Amir Amirani whose film displays the original written ruling of Britain’s then chief law officer, Lord Goldsmith, that military action in Iraq was inadmissible under international law. (The existence of such damning material helps to explain the endlessly postponed publication of the UK Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.) We Are Many keeps alive the issue of culpability of George W. Bush and Tony Blair for waging a war of aggression that flouted the principles laid down at Nuremburg in 1945. It was, declares John le Carre, the “crime of the century.”
