"IT'S STARTED" Warren Ellis: "I remember when Gulf War One kicked off. We'd all been waiting for it for days. That night, I was down at the local all-night burger place, writing LAZARUS CHURCHYARD; working longhand in a notebook in those days, sketching out the pages so I didn't ask for anything impossible to draw in the scripts. Sammy, the owner, would tell my friends that I'd been in their until 4am, "making his little drawings and taking tablets with his Coke." The little TV was on in there, but he wasn't turning down the radio or the bloody fruit machines. I looked up, and the balloon went up and the cruise missiles banged off and we'd gotten our war on. I stood at the counter, watching a war start on TV, with a fruit-machine background of bingbingbingbing bloopbloop chakkachakkachakka you're a winner! After about forty-five minutes, the initial bombardment paused, and I ran home. My housemate was waiting at the stairs. We both yelled at each other, "It's started!" Stayed up til dawn watching the first war to be fully televised. Last night, I had the BBC News 24 videostream open on the right hand side of my screen while I wrote in the left, AOL open in the bottom quarter of the screen so I could trade email with Fraction and Peter Rose, both channel-surfing in the States. And we thought watching the first one on TV was creepy. There's a webcam in Baghdad, but it's down. The crump of bombing distorted out of my speakers, as I looked down on Baghdad at dawn through the BBC camera. They had a reporter on the phone in central Baghdad, and he couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice: I'm in the centre of the city and they're not bombing me. Anti-aircraft fire cracked over his voice. Imagine being in one of those houses. With your family. You never got to dissent. This war's got nothing to do with you. You can hear the sound of the world's big dog scratching and booming outside your door, and you never did anything wrong but to be born there. Regime change could have been effected twelve years ago and very few people would have argued the toss, the tangle of America's fickle affections aside. In a different phase of American geopolitical manipulation, Saddam Hussein was the lesser of two evils, and no-one wanted to see crazy Iran win a Middle East war. That Saddam is a little bastard is almost irrelevant now. The real needs of this war have little to do with Saddam being a basket case who shouldn't be allowed to run a bath, let alone a country. The instances where there were actual justification for going in, taking him and putting him in front of a court are long gone. There were other ways. There were always other ways. And now we, able to dissent, made complicit by democracy, will wear the stink of a para-legal war of oil and Robespierrean guillotine politics for a long time." Mike is blogging to: dumb fucks on Question Time