No, not the consumerfest of tacky romance – that was yesterday. Today is the fifth anniversary of the record-breaking protests against the invasion of Iraq. Two million people in London, and many more across the country and the world (including, for what it’s worth, the first ever protest on the continent of Antarctica), knew they were being lied to, and about to be made accessories to mass murder.

For Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop The War Coalition,

the millions on the march were right. Not just right on balance, but right on every single aspect of the question. There were no weapons of mass destruction, Iraq did turn into a bloodbath, the invasion did not help resolve the crisis in the Middle East, and it did damage the cohesion of our own society and imperil our civil liberties while not making us one whit safer from terrorism. So the people were smarter than the politicians.

Well, I for one am not gonna get unduly chuffed about having outsmarted George Bush. The truth is, I wasn’t entirely right about the war. I said it would be a disaster, that many thousands would die. In fact, it has been so much worse than even I expected. It is now beyond controversy to state that over a million Iraqis have died – that’s pushing 5% of the whole population – with millions more displaced or malnourished. The optimism of those who did greet the invaders as liberators has turned to bitterness as the infrastructure that supports their lives is torn apart, as torture becomes more widespread than even under the iron fist of the Ba’ath party, as vicious sectarian conflicts are stirred up in once peaceful neighbourhoods.

In Afghanistan, no-one knows how many have died. We “don’t do bodycounts“, remember, that’s what seperates “us” from our enemies. They deliberately target civilians, can you imagine, while we just lob bombs at them then put our fingers in our ears and pretend nobody is screaming. So I don’t know a number I can quote, but I know that there too it’s going worse than I could have imagined. For a while, we just had local allies who behaved as badly as the Taliban, but now we’re trying to win over the actual Taliban to police our occupation for us.

Meanwhile, the Afghan war has now spread deep into Pakistan, and the war in Iraq has an increasingly violent new appendage in the blossoming war between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. Israel has flattened half of Lebanon, and Ethiopia has turned Somalia into the biggest disaster in Africa. Forget the “birth pangs of the new Middle East”, this is turning into the shell shocking of half the old world.

Speaking of birth pangs, though…

Stop The War did not stop the war. Perhaps it was too much to hope for an aloof political elite drooling over a frankly mental mission of mass destruction to listen to the voice of reason, let alone to the voice of massive, furious dissent. Certainly, the February 15th demo has been one of the biggest political events in Britain this decade, as was the series of protests in Summer 2006 (over 100,000 in London against Blair’s support for the invasion of Lebanon, and tens of thousands in Manchester a few weeks later demanding his resignation, which he promptly announced).

These moments were far more telling, far more engaging than the elections in which fewer and fewer of us are bothering to vote. They may, as Murray suggests, have stopped the next war, but I think they’ve certainly shown us the way politics are going. It’s us very much against them – and we need to be as organised and as dedicated as they are. I’m guessing you’re against the war, you reading this (and if you aren’t, why aren’t you?), but your unspoken, individual dissent is nothing.

I’d just like to take this momentto ask anyone reading this not just to turn up on the 15th of March, but also to at least think about giving up some of your time to “building the movement”. There is literally nothing to stop you joining Stop The War, for example. Because our enemies – as anyone who opposed the war should know – are arrogant, ignorant, and armed to the teeth, and it’s going to take some coordinated mass action to stop them trying to have their wicked way.

Anyway, that’s got my little nag over with, promise.