In June 1937, Nancy Cunard, a supporter of the Republicans’ battle against Franco’s nationalists circulated a questionnaire to the writers of the time. It asked, ‘Are you for, or against, the legal government of the people of Spain?’ Inspired by Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf have repeated the exercise in the Gulf War of 1991 and the American-led 2003 invasion of Iraq in order to present ‘an objective record of a cross-section of the intellectual community’, which embraces both Jilly Cooper and Lord Skidelsky, by canvassing its opinions. The word ‘community’ is revealing. Writers are, like theatre ‘luvvies’, most comfortable with their own kind, including the dead. The contributors to this book conjure up the spirits of Virgil, Milton, Shelley, Byron, T.S. Eliot, Auden and Swinburne. It is a bit like pinning a tuft of the immortal Red Rum’s mane to the winner of the Grand National.
Two questions are addressed to the intellectual community: ‘Are you for or against the American-led action against Saddam Hussein’s regime in March 2003?’ and whether that military intervention will ‘bring lasting peace and stability to the region’? Given the leftward-leaning habits of the intellectual community, it comes as no surprise that of the 71 replies 50 are against the war and even more are doubtful about the prospects of lasting peace in the region.
It does come as a surprise that a number of respondents — especially the women — are committed pacifists whose opinions are rooted in the horrors of 1914-18. Wars just produce other wars: violence breeds violence and solves nothing. They echo H.G. Wells’s pleas for world government as the precondition for universal disarmament. To the realists this is Utopian nonsense. Things are what they are and the consequences will be what they will be.
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