Séamas O'Reilly: Remembering a small stand against the Iraq invasion, 20 years on

A semi-trailer truck full of ammunition is exploded by the Marines of the Second Tank Battalion during an advance on the outskirts of Baghdad on Friday, April 4, 2003. (AP Photo, Dallas Morning News/Cheryl Diaz Meyer) /Iraq War

In June 1976, the Sex Pistols played Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, a gig that’s since gone down in history as one of the most influential in modern history. There were, famously, only 40 people in attendance, making for quite a roomy feel in a venue that could hold 400. 

But among that well-spaced crowd stood an absurd cross-section of the future of British alternative music; the Buzzcocks, who had put the gig on; Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis and Peter Hook — the latter of whom would be so inspired he bought a bass guitar the very next day, so that the three could form Joy Division; Mark E Smith, the cranky figurehead behind art-punk pioneers The Fall; and a 17-year-old, pre-Smiths Morrissey who wrote a letter to NME extolling the virtues of the “bumptious” performance he’d seen. 

Throw in Tony Wilson, who would two years later found Factory Records, and you have a veritable Yalta conference of Britain’s musical future, all paying 50p to witness what Buzzcocks guitarist Steve Diggle called “the day the punk atom was split”.

Partly due to their accounts, the gig has another notable legacy: namely, the preponderance of people who now claim that they, too, had been there to see it. In the aptly-titled I Swear, I Was There: The Gig That Changed The World, author David Nolan describes the ever-growing phalanx of locals who’ve subsequently claimed to have been in attendance, to have touched the hem of punk’s safety-pinned garment as it was being made. So many fans have now made this claim, the story goes, that that slender crowd of 40 pimpled teens must now swell well into the thousands. One hopes the Lesser Trade Hall had decent overspill facilities.

I was reminded of all this during the week, as the great and good of political commentary took a moment to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, showing that the ‘I Swear I Was There’ mantra has an opposite phenomenon. The American press offered solemn reflections on the casualties of war, leaning slightly more on the US war dead, and a nebulous sense that America losing face in world affairs, than the several hundred thousand Iraqi fatalities. 

SKEWED PERSPECTIVES

The fact it cost the American taxpayer $3 trillion did come up a lot, but not the 29,000 bombs dropped by US/UK forces since 2003, destabilising a region which subsequently begat decades more torment for Iraq and neighbouring states. Granted, there was little sense in all this commentary, that the Iraq war had been a success, rather that its failures were just that; failures, mistakes, a regrettable lack of foresight within a military action no one seems to remember supporting or opposing.

“Success has many fathers”, wrote Italian diplomat Galeazzo Ciano, “but failure is an orphan”. 

Few events sired as many orphans as the Iraq War, whose cheerleaders now seem beset by a curious amnesia. So, even though The New York Times reported this week that Iraq is now “a freer place, but not a hopeful one” and The Times declared the war “an unmitigated disaster” leaving “a less stable, more dangerous world than at any time since the Second World War”, neither paper states that their very same front pages ardently supported it at the time. 

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Both prefer to suggest, via omission, that a war started on false premises for patently unjust ends, merely unfolded like a mysterious weather event, supported by people incapable of seeing its folly like the 36 million people — again, curiously unmentioned — who were there to protest against it worldwide.

Well, at the risk of sounding like a Mancunian punk, I was there. I was 17, and already exactly the kind of teenage socialist you can picture in your head. My Youth Against War activism mostly involved handing out leaflets between Foyleside and the Richmond Centre in Derry. 

The hope, I guess, was that we would radicalise shoppers on their way to JD Sport and Clare’s Accessories, breeding a whole new population of peaceniks among those browsing cut-price football boots and discount navel piercings. Our efforts may not have been sufficient to end the invasion, but neither were they particularly necessary, since the response we got was overwhelmingly, and emphatically, sympathetic. To the best of my knowledge, however, none of those people wrote for broadsheet newspapers.

ON THE MARCH

The war had, in fact, been so transparently imminent that a worldwide protest was held six weeks before it began. 

I journeyed to Belfast to march with 20,000 people there, in common with 40,000 in Dublin and 2 million in London (to this day, the single biggest protest in British history). In March, we notified our teachers that we would be staging a school walkout. It was a symbolic protest, especially so since we scheduled it just 30 minutes before the end of the school day.

At 3pm, having expected 20 or 30 students to accompany us, I left my physics class carrying a placard I’d made for the occasion, emerging from the school gates to discover our cohort numbered in the hundreds. We marched from Buncrana road to the Guildhall, arriving to cheers from the thousand or so already gathered there from the wider anti-war movement in the middle of a working day.

Opposition to the war, and all it stood for, was not just common but deep and widespread. Whether from shoppers, students, parents, our teachers, or anyone we cared to ask. When some schools suspended students over the walkouts, our principal refused to take any action against us because, in his words, he admired our principle and resolve.

For all my teenage arrogance, I didn’t believe we would stop what was about to happen. Least of all that Bush, Blair or the entire media apparatus that supported them, would ever face the accountability they have since successfully avoided. But neither did I believe that those protests would feature so minimally in the records now intent on implying that the war seemed sensible to everyone at the time. No history of the Iraq war can be told without foregrounding the fact that tens of millions of people around the world knew it was bogus and evil from the start. Those seeking to omit that part of the story may not have been on the streets with us, but we were there.