I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade

I don't actually. I sit in Elaine's restaurant on 2nd Avenue with a friend, but every word of Auden's poem "September 1st 1939" seems painfully apt. The atmosphere in the restaurant is grave. Apart from a couple next to us who are hissing abuse at each other, everyone is mute, their eyes on the television set, which sits on a shelf above the entrance. When we walked in, it seemed as if all eyes were on us. But all eyes were focused just above our heads on the president of the United States, who was addressing his nation on the state of the union.

Elaine's is famed for its dominant proprietor, its dour décor, its rude waiters and its reliable, if unchanging, food. It's a sanctuary for a certain kind of New Yorker, whose conversation is likely to be more about Lionel Trilling than Manolo Blahnik. In London in such a place - say the Union Club in Greek Street - a television broadcast by the head of state, the Queen's speech, would be accompanied by a sort of satirical obbligato. In Elaine's, the instinct to mock is tempered by a near feudal regard for the office of president and the gravity of his message.

Few people here doubt that war is going to happen, certainly not the management of the New York Times, who are taking their reporters off hit-and-run accidents in New Jersey to give them training to deal with kidnap and chemical attack in desert conditions in preparation for their transfer to the war zone. But few people seem to feel it will affect their lives. After all, Iraq is a long way off, only 10% of reservists have been called up, there's no prospect of the draft being introduced and, even though the nation is on "orange alert", there's still little evidence of any more security precautions on the subway or in public buildings. Only those of us of a certain age who grew up in an "old Europe" impoverished, exhausted and visibly scarred by bombs, seem to feel dogged by a constant shadow of apprehension at the imminence of another war.

There is little dissent on television and the press offers little to fuel debate. The members of the Washington press corps act as courtiers to the president, offering sententious pieties, meekly endorsing childish oxymorons like "clean war" and "smart bombs", and camouflaging the terse word "war" with the cloak of "military intervention" and "armed conflict". When Colin Powell addressed the UN in the lobby of the Security Council, a copy of Guernica, the 20th century's most celebrated reminder of the consequences of aerial bombardment, was covered with a large blue curtain. It was not "appropriate", said a spokesman, for Powell to talk about war in front of women, children and horses screaming with terror.

It's no surprise therefore that it's widely broadcast that the war will be short and painless - "rapid, accurate and dazzling" in the words of Christopher Hitchens. The Americans will be greeted as emancipators, rebuilding Iraq will be simple, the Arab world will not turn against the US and democracy will be strengthened. If this sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie in which the good guys do the difficult things for the right reasons, it's probably supposed to. After the attacks on the Twin Towers, the US government consulted the movie industry on national strategy: if Hollywood had dealt with rogue asteroids and alien invaders it could unquestionably sort out Islamic terrorists. Having acted as strategists, the studio bosses have now reverted to their more familiar role as propagandists. "Hollywood rallies round the homeland," said the New York Times recently. Movies will be "positive", "life affirming", "on the side of right". What the public wants, they say, is "to see the bad guy gotten".

If the move to war seems to us, the spectators, to be unrolling like a movie, is it any less so to the sol diers who are going to fight it? When I made a film about the Falklands war, I was told by a number of veterans that they had watched war movies on the QE2 on their way to the south Atlantic. Their favourite films were Apocalypse Now and Rambo and, when they went into battle, the films were running in their heads. In spite of their training, they were shocked to discover that although they might shout "Action!", nobody was calling "Cut!", and the blood, the wounds, the corpses and the ruined lives were all too real.

The probable reality of a war against Iraq is that the US will occupy Iraq, invoke the wrath of the Arab world, become a sitting target for al-Qaida, and complete the circle of Bin Laden's strategy when he bombed the World Trade Centre. "I and the public know," wrote Auden, "What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done, Do evil in return." It's a lesson that the American president might be immune to. He is "often uncurious", according to the opportunistic ex-speechwriter David Frum, who coined the phrase the "axis of evil". In spite of Bush's lack of curiosity about the world, he is, says Frum, "courageous and tenacious", making him in Frum's view a "great president" but in mine, the possessor of a lethal amalgam of ignorance and aggressiveness.

I will fully support President Bush when he stands up and says: "My fellow Americans, we are going to war not only because we want to free the Iraqi people from the yoke of tyranny, take weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of evil murderers and enforce a settlement between Israel and Palestine, but also because I want to guarantee my fellow Americans the inalienable right to cheap gasoline, I want to protect the business interests of my colleagues in government, and I want to secure another term as president." It could only happen in the movies. Until then I am left with despair, a voice of protest and Auden's poem written over 60 years ago.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Auden famously disowned the last line and until recently I felt indignant about his change of heart, like the woman I heard on the subway talking to her book: "No no no no, you've been disowned, you fuck!"

He changed "We must love one another or die" to "We must love one another and die", moving from wilful optimism to despairing resignation. Now I think he was right.

© Richard Eyre