A Road Well Travelled

From the same article

John Pattison, 29, said he and his wife flew in from Portland, Ore., to attend his first anti-war rally. He said his opposition to the war had developed over time.

"Quite literally on the night that shock and awe commenced, my friend and I toasted the military might of the United States," Pattison said. "We were quite proud and thought we were doing the right thing."

He said the way the war had progressed and U.S. foreign policy since then had forced him to question his beliefs.

"A lot of the rhetoric that we hear coming from Christians has been dominated by the religious right and has been strong advocacy for the war," Pattison said. "That's just not the way I read my Gospel."

I recognise myself in John Pattison.

At first thinking our respective governments (I'm British, John is American), were telling us the truth and that in Afghanistan we were just giving them "what for" for 9/11, then, in the months following the invasion of Iraq, a country that we now know posed no threat to the UK or the USA, gradually realising that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and the day by day assurances that WMDs would eventually be found, then the embarrassing realisation that there were none and that we had gone to war on the basis of a lie, a lie told to the British and American Governments by sources connected to the Iraqi Government-in-waiting, who had an obvious interest in going to war, a lie which, I believed then, our respective governments believed in good faith, but which I am now convinced, they knew was without basis all along.

So, was the war a big mistake?

No, not in their eyes.

They knew there was no Saddam-AlQaeda connection and that there were no WMDs from the get go and went to war for their own nefarious reasons.