We Are Many

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XFM, 104. 9.

I'm Ricky Gervais. With me Steve Merchant.

I'll tell you what. I was walking here today,

and the West End is crammed.

There's helicopters. There's police.

There's about a million people

sort of just milling around,

standing around with placards and stuff.

They've got too much time

on their hands. They need a war.

You don't read the newspapers, do you?

Boring.

BBC Radio Four.

What's thought to be the biggest

demonstration in British history

is taking place in Central London.

The organizers say nearly two million people

have gathered to oppose war against Iraq.

From Auckland to Athens, Berlin to Bangkok,

some 600 cities across the world.

Can you do that again?

15th of February 2003.

We're in London,

just outside Trafalgar Square.

It's the anti-war march.

There's lots and lots of people here.

It's a terrible legacy...

...for those people who died on 9/11,

that we're now killing

more people in their name.

That's my opinion, anyway.

February 15th was the single largest

mobilization of people

in the history of humanity, bar none.

It was the biggest demonstration coordinated

in the history of the whole Earth.

Do you think we can stop this war?

I think if we tried really hard, yeah.

I think we can stop this war.

The Prime Minister

avoided the protestors outside

chanting "No blood for oil."

Millions of British people telling you

we don't want this war.

Now will you listen?

Listen to the people, Tony.

Listen to the people.

This is a battle with only one outcome.

Our victory, not theirs.

Something began on that day

that, uh... that cannot be reversed.

Whoo!

I was in New York. I'm a New Yorker.

I work as a nurse practitioner,

and I was at work that day.

I was at work at Tinker

Air Force Base in Oklahoma.

It was an ordinary day.

I was in an airplane on my way

from Stockholm to New York.

And I remember waking up

in the morning, early, jetlagged,

and I went out jogging,

and I came in and turned on the news.

I'm going to interrupt

because of the latest news.

A plane has crashed

into the World Trade Center.

We've got Warner on the phone,

who's watching and looking at it right now.

You can see the fire, you can see the smoke.

I mean, it's a monster hole, you know.

Oh, my God.

That looks like a second plane.

Oh, my God.

The second tower has exploded

in a gargantuan explosion!

And at that point I didn't know

that my brother was at the Trade Center.

It was horrific.

And I knew, I knew in a flash,

whatever was happening at that moment,

this was the beginning

of something even worse.

The deliberate and deadly attacks

which were carried out yesterday

against our country

were more than acts of terror.

They were acts of war.

September 12th 2001,

was the day that changed the world.

Not September 11th.

Because that was the day that

George W Bush announced to the world

that the answer to this huge crime

would be our war.

It was downhill after that.

The evidence now shows that on the very...

Well, within 24 hours of the attack,

they had basically decided to attack Iraq.

Was it Cheney or Rumsfeld, one of those,

at the first meeting

after the attack on the Twin Towers,

said, "That's it, let's go for Iraq?"

And now's an opportunity

to do, uh, generations a favor

by coming together and whipping terrorism.

It is a long-term campaign

which is why we are characterizing it

as a war.

Your loss we count as our loss.

Your struggle we take as our struggle.

Now that war has been declared on us,

we will lead the world

to victory, to victory.

This is a moment to seize.

The kaleidoscope has been shaken.

The pieces are in flux.

Soon they will settle again.

Before they do,

let us reorder this world around us.

We were fearful. We were concerned.

We were anxious about the way

that the US was going to retaliate,

and we had very little confidence

they were gonna behave sensibly.

Over a few days,

we started talking on the phone,

getting together, and said "Look,

we're gonna set up a Stop The War Coalition."

They set up the Stop The War Coalition.

They asked me to be president of it,

which I very happily accepted.

And there was a meeting called.

They knew immediately

that there was going to be a war,

and so they had a meeting

in Friends House here.

I attended that meeting. It was amazing.

Hall after hall after hall.

The entire building was taken over.

It took just five days to organize,

but the Stop The War protest

and meeting attracted so many people,

they had to close the doors.

I wrote a leaflet for that meeting,

and the title of the meeting

was "Stop The War Before It Starts."

That's what was on the leaflet.

And that's why it became

the Stop The War Coalition.

It's just absolutely unbelievable

that that particular event

triggered such a momentous movement.

The war on terrorism begins.

America and Britain strike Afghanistan.

President Bush says the campaign

will be sustained,

comprehensive and relentless.

Afghanistan, I was completely gung-ho for it.

We were excited to be doing our job

and exacting retribution

on the enemy for 9/11.

And in fact, I even had pictures

of myself on a ladder

in the bomb bay of a B-1 bomber

signing bombs.

Various obscenities

and things like "This is for my sister

in New York City."

It became clear that phase one

was going to be Afghanistan,

and, of course, it wasn't going to take

much to defeat the Taliban.

It wasn't much of a war, and it wasn't said,

but the sense was there wasn't

much glory in it, either.

It didn't somehow answer 9/11,

and that's when the talk of phase two began.

My fellow Americans, let's roll.

Bush came up with his extraordinary

speech in January 2002.

Our war against terror is only beginning.

Iraq continues to flaunt

its hostility toward America

and to support terror.

States like these and their terrorist allies

constitute an axis of evil.

We wanted connection with 9/11,

and we pressed that and pressed that

and pressed that

until we lied to the American people.

I mean, we had something like 51 to 60

percent of the American people

believing that Saddam Hussein

was connected with 9/11.

From then on we're building up

towards a war with Iraq,

and we now know how closely involved

the British Government was with this.

But to allow weapons of mass destruction

to be developed by a state like Iraq,

without let or hindrance,

would be grossly to ignore

the lessons of September 11th,

and we will not do it.

We were sharing intelligence.

We were sharing preparations

for the kind of marketing campaign

we'd do if we decided to go to war.

The weapons of mass destruction

was an important thing

to hold up to the public,

and I'm not saying

that they were in bad faith,

but they had many other reasons

that pushed them about,

and about which they didn't talk.

8:
00. The first element

of the government's strategy

for winning over the doubters was released.

MPs had three and a half hours

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