Whose war is this anyway?

The papers are full of armchair generals wanting to send Our Boys in to bash the enemy. Joan Smith despairs of columnists who are wallowing in Second World War nostalgia

Not a single shot has been fired so far, but there's no doubt we're at war. First it was the columnists, exchanging noisy salvos over the efficacy of a "war on terrorism". The Charge of the Right Brigade, led by Generals Gove, Harris, Daley, Littlejohn and Pollard – in The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun and Daily Mail respectively – offered the delicious irony of democracy's self-appointed defenders trying to bully anyone who disagreed with them into cowed silence. For these armchair generals, it must have come as a shock to discover from an Observer poll that only a little more than half the male population shares their enthusiasm for committing British troops to a "war on terrorism".

But that wasn't the only significant result in the poll. It also revealed a quieter but no less striking gender divide, with only 36 per cent of women supporting the idea of sending troops to Afghanistan. At first sight, this appears to confirm the theory that women are less warlike than men, an idea that was certainly common currency during the Greenham Common protests in the early 1980s. I'm far from convinced by this notion, but it is worth noting that both figures confirm anecdotal evidence that Tony Blair's public pronouncements about supporting the President are not universally popular, especially among women voters.

The Wapping and Canary Wharf Home Guard do, however, have the largely uncritical support of the popular press, where a predictable bout of technophilia is already bursting out. The run-up to war is a difficult time for journalists, who aren't included in Pentagon or MoD planning sessions and have to make to do with reporting not-particularly-riveting troop movements. On TV, reporters don flak jackets and fondle missiles; newspapers dig out library pictures of previous conflicts and bombard us with statistics about how many planes and ships are being despatched to the conflict zone.

It is at this point, I think, that a genuine but more subtle gender difference becomes apparent. The attitudes to war of men and women, once hostilities break out and the gruesome reality becomes apparent, do not seem to me to diverge drastically. They may have done in the past, when many combatants consciously chose to protect their wives, children and parents from the grim truth about life in the trenches. But mass communications, and the awesome increase in civilian casualties as the 20th century wore on, have changed all that.

The real difference in how men and women think about war – and there are already dramatic examples of this in the past week's newspapers – lies in the realm of fantasy. While the body bags and the broken bodies of children still wait in the future, editors and their more bellicose columnists indulge themselves in what are, effectively, war games; "our" forces and weapons are bigger and better than anyone else's, while people who have never been anywhere near Afghanistan confidently explain how Our Boys will defeat the cowardly enemy on his own terrain.

Thus yesterday's Sun crowed about "Bush's awesome firepower". It also wheeled out the paper's political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, to compare the "chattering classes" who oppose the approaching conflict with "the people who spoke up for Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin". These are familiar tactics from the old Cold War days, when anyone who opposed the arms race between two arrogant superpowers was smeared as a communist fellow-traveller.

So what do these editors and columnists, who are once again trying to turn peace into a dirty word, actually want? The answer is to be found on the front page of yesterday's Mirror, which was filled with a picture of a sniper taking aim and a claim that Osama bin Laden "was trapped in his mountain lair last night as SAS troops moved to seal his escape routes". I haven't the faintest idea whether or not the SAS are already operating in Afghanistan, although I was assured over the weekend that they were by several friends, all of them male and all on the political left.

The point I am making is that this is not a news story but a jingoistic fantasy. It puts Britain at the heart of events that are actually being orchestrated by the Americans, mythologises the SAS – as Michael Portillo once did in a notorious speech as Defence Secretary – and is neither probable nor disprovable. Such stories universally carry male bylines and they remind me of a famous front page at the beginning of the Kosovo conflict two years ago, when The Sun boasted about RAF Harriers pounding Slobodan Milosevic in a daring night raid; within 24 hours, it emerged that the planes had turned back to their base in Italy without dropping a single bomb, frustrated by nothing more sophisticated than the weather.

Things like this happen in real conflicts. My father, who served in the Navy during the Second World War, described it as lengthy periods of tedium interspersed with intervals of absolute horror as he watched ships explode and men die horribly in the water. The Telegraph columnist Robert Harris, whose own obsession with that conflict is evident from his novels, has compared columnists like me who question a "war on terrorism" with Lenin's "useful idiots".

Harris and I both belong to the post-war generation, born in the 1950s, and he has admitted to feeling "an odd sense of having missed out on something" as a consequence. Perhaps what he is really talking about – and what other gung-ho journalists are unconsciously expressing – is a regret that their masculinity has not been tested by conflict. Nor is it likely to be, since columnists, no matter how bellicose their attitudes, very rarely go to war. Not that that will restrain them, for insecurity notoriously incites belligerence. On the contrary, new fronts will open up every day, in the war of words as well as in Asia.