We went to see Armando Ianucci's In The Loop over the weekend. Despite the film's anti-war premise, and despite being someone who thought invading Iraq might turn out to be marginally better than leaving Saddam in place, I laughed till my face ached.
But it wasn't just the antics of uber-angry Malcolm Tucker (right) that were funny. There were two other things about the film which made me smile.
Firstly, the alleged sexing up of the WMD intelligence, on which the film turns, overlooked the crucial point that almost no-one believed Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier at the time. Sure, there are left-wing Labour MPs who claim that they wouldn't have voted for the war if it hadn't been for Campbell's gilding the lily; but they have short memories. Not long after it was produced, the dossier was widely ridiculed when a PhD student pointed out that some of it came from his work published on the internet. Then, as now, public credulity was in short supply.
But although the direct evidence was small, we knew Saddam had had WMD; we knew he had used gas on Kurdish villages; we knew he was doing everything he could to thwart Hans Blix and his colleagues; we knew that in Iraq's police state, where torture of dissidents and their families was routine, it would be very difficult to recruit informers, and hence the lack of direct evidence was not surprising.
Thus the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, and not surprisingly everyone I spoke to (and this was a period in which bruising rows with my friends who opposed the war were routine) believed Saddam had WMD. Without exception. The idea that the UK's parliament, the US government and the UN Security Council were swayed into war by a bad-tempered Scottish spin-doctor is itself a piece of spin. Because, unappealing though the British government's manoevres may have been, they made no difference to the outcome. As a public, we believed Saddam had the weapons anyway.
Of course Mr Ianucci would say, "It's a satire; a fictionalised account. It's not meant to be a historical reconstruction". Well OK up to a point. But when real opponents of the war argue that we were led into it by a foul-mouthed Scottish spin doctor who sexed up the intelligence, and - lo and behold! - that's exactly what happens in Ianucci's film, it's a claim that will only run so far.
The second thing that struck me was, where was Saddam in all this? Nowhere. In Ianucci's film the war was to take place in abstract. That it would have the effect of removing from power one of the twentieth century's most ghastly dictators was airbrushed from sight.
Why should this make me smile? Because it confirms my thesis that if there's one thing the anti-war brigade don't want to hear about it's talk of Saddam. How inconvenient to be reminded of how things were under his regime! As for what things would have carried on being like (after Saddam, his sons, then some other Ba'ath Party strongman), these are things opponents of the war cannot even begin to contemplate. For them, success would have meant vast and peaceful rallies in London and Washington, followed by a climb-down by Bush and Blair.
And for them, Iraq would have continued to be "a faraway country", to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, "of which we know nothing".
