Why the invasion and occupation of Iraq still matters

Just what is it that drives people to immerse themselves in a political cause or movement against a war being waged thousands of miles away, involving a country they have never visited, and a people and a culture they have no obvious connection with?

Indeed, one of the most remarkable and ennobling aspects of the human condition is our ability to experience empathy, compassion, and to express and demonstrate solidarity with complete strangers. History is littered with examples of this. In the case of Iraq, in the run up to the war in 2003, millions of people around the world exerted themselves in trying to stop what they knew would be, and turned out to be, a human catastrophe for the Iraqi people, whose only crime was that they happened to live in a country that sits on a sea of oil.

I was living in the United States in the run-up to the war in the Iraq, in what was in many respects a double life. By day I was Ben Affleck’s stand in/double on the movie Surviving Christmas, and by night I was attending antiwar meetings in an office in East Los Angeles, organising and planning events in opposition to the Bush administration’s drive to war.