True Colours -- authors comment on Iraq war.

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True colours

In 1937 WH Auden and Stephen Spender asked 150 writers for their views on the Spanish Civil War. The result was the book Authors Take Sides. Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf have repeated the exercise, asking literary figures if they were for or against the Iraq war and whether they thought it would bring lasting peace and stability

Saturday February 14, 2004
The Guardian

Dannie Abse | Beryl Bainbridge | Julian Barnes | Jim Crace | Louis de Bernières | Margaret Drabble | Duncan Fallowell | Antonia Fraser | Nadine Gordimer | David Guterson | David Hare | John Heath-Stubbs | Michael Holroyd | John Keegan | Thomas Keneally | Francis King | John le Carré | David Lodge | Nicholas Mosley | Sara Paretsky | Harold Pinter | Alan Sillitoe | Studs Terkel | Paul Theroux | DM Thomas
Dannie Abse

Bring your TV cameras, bring your microphones.
Soldiers to the broad gate, soldiers to the fire.
Oblivion is their name, vultures to their bones,
While far behind, with proper melancholy,
The ineffectual poet strums his lyre.

Beryl Bainbridge

I was against the attack on Iraq, not because of any considered understanding of the reasons for such a conflict, rather because I lean towards the belief that wars have been waged for centuries and that victory has never been of any use to the dead. I also believe that Saddam Hussein was bound to die sooner or later, and that, judging by press reports, his successors were too demented, drugged and diseased to hold on to power for very long. As the Americans and ourselves have reportedly been bombing Iraq for the last 12 years, I couldn't imagine why it would be necessary to stage an invasion.

My own experience of war, that of England against Hitler, in which the death toll came to 55 million, was played out during my childhood in Liverpool. I carried a gas mask to school, and when the air-raid sirens sounded, filed in a crocodile line to the shelters in the dug-up hockey field. At night, my brother and I were put to bed under the dining-room table.

We had a picture of Marshal Stalin on our kitchen wall. My father said Uncle Joe was the saviour of the world. I was introduced in the Kardomah Café to a man called Mr Gerhart, who had fled Germany in 1938. He had a dent in his forehead where he'd been hit for being Jewish. Mr Gerhart said the war was being fought because the Nazis wanted to wipe out the Jews.

Lots more at link:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1147406,00.html