Diana Wichtel: I'm with Helen Clark on Iraq

It was unsettling to watch perhaps the best Holocaust movie I've seen - and I've seen a few - with 21st-century war slouching ever closer. I bawled my way through Schindler's List, a soggy mass of expertly pushed buttons. Through The Pianist I sat mostly dry-eyed and stunned.

Polanski's more or less true story of Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival in World War II Warsaw was always going to get me. My Polish father made it through the Holocaust in similarly improbable ways, except that piano-playing wasn't, as far as I know, a factor.

The Pianist doesn't go to the camps and the ovens. You're left to imagine something even worse than what we're seeing on screen as the Nazis, and not a few Poles, turn Warsaw into a very plausible vision of Hell.

The movie is also a profound anti-war document. Polanski looks behind the efficient Nazi extermination machine to find something even more frightening. What makes your blood run cold is how mad, random and irrational it all was.

This is a world in which an old man in a wheelchair is tipped from a balcony because he doesn't stand when the Nazis enter his home.

Szpilman isn't heroic, except in the sense that anyone who could survive that is a hero. But as his scarecrow figure scrambles through an increasingly absurdist wasteland, clinging to shreds of his life, you are made vividly aware of the power and value of a human life.

Which is why I'm with Helen Clark on Iraq.

I won't be shedding any tears if and when Saddam gets his. But the least we can ask of our leaders is that they send their citizens to die only when there is no other conceivable course of action. That a threat be "clear and present" is surely a bottom line when it comes to the awesome decision to unleash hell on another country.

And, as Clark keeps maintaining, terms like "unilateral" and "pre-emptive" are not ones to be legitimised lightly. History shows they can lead to all kinds of madness.

It's not just the usual ragtag suspects in the street who aren't convinced about this war. Even top members of Tony Blair's Cabinet, who are surely supremely well-informed about what Saddam is up to, are saying "not in my name".

Not that I'm a pacifist. Had there been too many of those during World War II, I wouldn't be here to have an opinion. But I may yet march against this war, if I can overcome my allergy to bad anti-war chants and the simplistic slogans of some elements of the peace movement.

The other night, on wacky Triangle television, I heard one leading light say that the Iraqi people should be left to overthrow Saddam when they want to. That's like saying that the Jews - or the people of East Timor - should have been left to decide their own fate.

If the United Nations Security Council, imperfect as it is, had voted to put more pressure on Saddam, a non-military New Zealand presence would not have been unreasonable. There comes a point at which a despot sitting in his palaces on piles of money bled from his suffering people is almost as repugnant as war. The same goes for Kim Jong-il. The jackboot is the jackboot, wherever it is.

But backing Bush on what he seems increasingly to believe is a solo mission from God is another matter. His ultimatum speech occasionally dropped into the old, familiar apocalyptic tone: "final days"; "the day of horror"; "the day of your liberation is near".

And the especially arrogant "May God continue to bless America", as if everything so far has the Almighty's seal of approval. To say you're either with us or against us, and if you're against us I'll do it anyway, is an odd way to defend democracy.

Such rhetoric called to mind a news story the other day about a couple of New York fish-market workers who encountered a talking carp. It didn't sing "Take Me to the River". Instead, it spoke in Hebrew, saying that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is nigh.

Whether the fish is for or against the invasion wasn't reported. But when the war was eventually debated in our Parliament, the level of discourse was right up there with the talking carp.

Bill English has been busy doing the sums of "the raw calculus of military might" and decided we should back the coalition of the winning. If we only backed winners, where would Bill be?

Richard Prebble said the Government's stance makes us "more irrelevant" than we have ever been. I suppose it is better for us to be just a little irrelevant, rather than a lot irrelevant. Or is our relevance irrelevant?

Winston managed to work in immigration.

Amid that lot, it wasn't difficult for the PM to sound sensible: "It is a matter of profound regret to us that some of closest friends have chosen to stand outside the Security Council at this point. For a new and dangerous precedent is being set."

Once the fighting started, she didn't waver. "This Government will not be assisting a war for which there was no case at this time."

British Commons Leader Robin Cook put the same position supremely reasonably when he resigned from Blair's Cabinet: "I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support."

As I write, there is news that handfuls of Iraqi soldiers have already surrendered. The best to be hoped for now is that the Iraqi people aren't convinced about fighting this war either.

Herald Feature: Iraq