You know Brian Eno? Musician, or as he says non-musician, inventor of ambient music, and producer of groups like Talking Heads, David Bowie, Depeche Mode, and U2, he’s sufficiently iconic to be a character in Salman Rushdie’s wonderful homage to pop music (and love, and life, and the universe), The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

It’s not just his production skills, either.

Our leaders would undoubtedly be happy if we “moved on” from Iraq. They don’t want to talk about it any more: it was a dreadful blunder, and reflects little credit on any of them. Presumably this is why the question has hardly been debated in parliament. Although the majority of the public were always against the war, this was not reflected by their elected representatives. The government behaved in a way that was transparently undemocratic but the Conservatives won’t call them on it, for without their almost unanimous support the whole project couldn’t have happened.

But to conveniently forget Iraq now is to forfeit the only possible benefit the war might have: the chance to rethink the dysfunctional political system that got us into this hole. If we don’t, we risk digging a series of ever deeper holes.

The Iraq adventure was justified as the planting of a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Not only did it utterly fail at that, it also undermined our democracy. Appealing to our paranoia more than our vision, George Bush and Tony Blair obtained restrictions on freedoms that had taken centuries to evolve. They said these were necessary to ensure our security — a device used by authoritarian leaders since time immemorial.

[…]

If we don’t stand up about Iraq then we tacitly sanction the next steps in this deadly experiment of democratic evangelism. Those will likely include an attack on Iran, a permanent force of occupation in Iraq (probably always the intention), the complete militarisation of the Middle East, and a revived nuclear future.

Apparently the Brown government, which only a couple weeks ago appeared ready to cruise through an early election, is being tested in a variety of ways. One of its chosen responses was to ban a demonstration, scheduled for the day Parliament opens, under an apparently rarely used 1839 law.

Eno is part of the Stop the War coalition that was planning the demonstration, so you can imagine he’s less than pleased.

It would take courage for Gordon Brown to say: “This war was a catastrophe.” It would take even greater courage to admit that the seeds of the catastrophe were in its conception: it wasn’t a good idea badly done (the neocons’ last refuge — “Blame it all on Rumsfeld”), but a bad idea badly done. And it would take perhaps superhuman courage to say: “And now we should withdraw and pay reparations to this poor country.”

I don’t see it happening. But the demonstration will, legal or not: on Monday Tony Benn will lead us as we exercise our right to remind our representatives that, even if Iraq has slipped off their agenda, it’s still on ours. Please join us.