Rai, Milan

The elections in Iraq have been an unprecedented opportunity for ordinary people to influence the destiny of their country, but the National Assembly they have elected is so hedged in with US imposed restrictions that the cabinet it produces will be more like a chain-gang of prisoners than an independent government. A prominent Iraqi politician in the Shia coalition told the New Yorker in January that the US had quietly told the parties before the election that there were three…

The woman passed by, then came back and took a leaflet. She read it, and as a result came on her first political demonstration, in London, on 28 September 2002, with 400,000 others protesting against war on Iraq. She also brought her husband and her five-year-old son. She'd never been politically active before, but within weeks she'd set up a local anti-war group in her town.

This story was told to me by an anti-war activist in Northampton, who concluded by saying, “I used to wonder…