This week's Dáil decision on Shannon refuelling signals Irish alignment with a US-dominated 'coalition of the willing' to replace the UN, argues Fintan O'Toole
Felix Grant was the first. He died after an operation at a hospital in the Congo in October 1960. Peadar Ó Flatharta was the most recent, killed in an accidental shooting in East Timor last April. In the years between, 82 other Irish soldiers gave their lives for the United Nations and its ideals of peace and justice. In West Africa and Cyprus, in Lebanon, in Syria and Timor, this State has paid the price in blood for an institution that, for all its imperfections and failures, has commanded our loyalties.
Whether humble privates such as Gerard Killeen and William O'Brien or commandants such as Thomas Wickham and Michael Nestor, they came from every corner and all classes. Some died in tragic accidents or misadventures. But many were killed in action. Nine men died at the Niemba ambush in November 1960, two at the Battle of the Tunnel a year later, three at Tibnine Bridge in October 1982, three in a landmine explosion at Bra'Shit in March 1989.
The landscapes in which they died were very different and their killers had a wide variety of political motives. But their deaths made a single statement: that, contrary to the taunts of the gung-ho militarists, this State does not seek a free ride in international security. It has put its young men in harm's way. Irish families have paid dearly for our stated ideals. In at least two cases - Patrick Mullins, whose corpse still lies somewhere in the Congo, and Kevin Joyce, missing in Lebanon since 1981 - they have been left without even a body to bury.
The belief in the primacy of the United Nations for which these men died is not shared by the present administration in Washington. Writing in the Spectator this week (and reprinted today in main paper, page 12), the intellectual architect of the invasion of Iraq, Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's defence policy board, danced in open exultation on the grave of the UN.
He wrote that, in his fall, Saddam "will take the UN down with him". While he regretted that "the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat", he rejoiced in the "wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions". The "true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the UN" is "coalitions of the willing". The UN is dead, long live groups of nations acting under US leadership outside the restrictions of international law.
Perle and his allies in the administration, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, do not indulge in empty rhetoric. It has taken the rest of the world quite a while to realise that they mean precisely what they say. When they say that there is an axis of evil states which must be destroyed one by one, they mean it. When they enunciate a new doctrine of pre- emptive wars, in which force will be used, not in response to a threat but to prevent a threat from emerging, they are utterly serious.
The invasion of Iraq without UN sanction is evidence, if such were needed, that Perle is absolutely in earnest about the sweeping away of an institution he and his colleagues on the American right have long regarded with utter contempt. Far from regretting the failure to secure a mandate for their action from the Security Council, they are delighted to be killing two birds with one stone: the Butcher of Baghdad and the bleating liberals on the Hudson.
It is this explicit intention which makes the Government's complete acquiescence in the war so momentous and so extraordinary. In her Dáil speech on Thursday, Mary Harney suggested that Ireland should not antagonise the US and the UK because they are "putting their people in harm's way in a cause they believe is right". Yet it clearly does not matter that in doing so the US is also sweeping aside an institution for which successive governments have put Irish troops in harm's way and whose cause we believed to be so right that it was worth dying for.
Worth dying for, apparently, but not worth risking a little diplomatic discomfort. For that is all we risked. Neither the Taoiseach nor the Tánaiste, in arguing for the continued use of Shannon airport by US warplanes on the way to the Gulf, could specify any dire consequences of taking a principled stand for the UN.
The idea that US multinationals, which make massive profits here, would pull out of Ireland if we made a minor gesture by not allowing troop transports to refuel at Shannon is so patently absurd that it was almost entirely dropped from Government speeches. The alleged threat that the Bush administration might increase taxes on these corporations' profits in Ireland ignores the obvious facts that this is perhaps the most pro-corporate administration in US history and that it has a deep ideological aversion to taxing profits of any kind.
Citing US and UK involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process as a reason to collude in the destruction of the UN is scarcely more credible. In the case of the UK, the idea that Tony Blair, in a sulk at Ireland's lack of support for his Iraqi adventures, would somehow abandon the Belfast Agreement misses the little detail that Northern Ireland is part of the UK and that the peace process is a vital national interest of that state.
American involvement in the process, meanwhile, is protected by the equally obvious fact that it plays well with Irish-American voters, a crucial swing constituency in the neck-and-neck contest between Republicans and Democrats. Does anyone seriously believe that George W. Bush wants to campaign for re-election as the president who told the Irish to go to hell?
Anyway, in the overall scheme of the war, Shannon is not all that important to the US. Some of the transport companies which were using it, stopped doing so voluntarily because of security concerns. Their decision to use other airports had no discernible effect on the American military build-up. Why should Ireland become the focus of US vindictiveness when there are much more obvious targets - France for a start - so readily available?
Even if there were to be real consequences, however, a self-respecting State might be expected to stand by a cause for which it has shed blood. Poorer, less developed countries that are even more economically dependent on the US - Mexico and Chile, for example - came under intense US pressure in recent weeks because they are members of the Security Council. They did not capitulate.
Neither did Ireland when it, too, was poor, vulnerable and facing a far more formidable threat than it does now. It was poignant this week to read Robert Brennan's recently re-published memoir of his time as Irish legate in Washington.
In March 1941, he accompanied the Minister for Defence, Frank Aiken on a visit to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although the US was still technically neutral, FDR wanted Ireland to allow Britain to use the Treaty ports in the war. There was a real threat, then and subsequently, of an invasion to secure them. Roosevelt became so angry with Aiken's requests that the US express its disapproval of such an invasion that he sent silverware crashing from the table. Aiken seems not to have flinched.
Nor did he flinch in 1957, when Ireland defied enormous political and public pressure in the US and supported the admission of China to the UN. The American ambassador at the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge, accused Aiken of "going nuts". Washington asked the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman to threaten Aiken that "if he votes for Red China, we'll raise the devil".
Fianna Fáil used to be very proud of the fact that Aiken withstood this pressure. It also used to take justifiable pride in its one great contribution to international law, the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, which was initiated by Aiken. Yet that treaty is itself a silent victim of the new American foreign policy.
The principle of non-proliferation has been replaced by an unwritten rule that weapons of mass destruction are OK in the hands of US allies (Pakistan or Israel, for example) but not in the hands of its enemies. The attraction of nuclear weapons to tin-pot dictators everywhere has been massively increased by the evidence that the US will attack states that don't have them but will think twice about those that do.
Having sent Irish troops to die for the now apparently contemptible "liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions", Fianna Fáil has now effectively abandoned that tradition.
The Government contends, of course, that the use of Shannon does not really amount to participation in the war. Even if this were true, it certainly amounts to something even more momentous: support for the replacement of the UN by US-led "coalitions of the willing". This is certainly how George W. Bush interprets it.
In his declaration of war on Monday night, he said: "More than 35 countries are giving crucial support, from the use of naval and air bases to help with intelligence and logistics to the deployment of combat units. Every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duty and share the honour of serving in our common defence." This political formula gets to the heart of the administration's new dogma: help with the logistics of deployment makes you a member of the coalition. And we have Perle's word for it that the coalition is not an adjunct to the UN but an alternative to it.
This, in turn, is part of a larger US strategy that Perle and Rumsfeld have again spelt out with commendable clarity. They have told us, very clearly, that no other power will be allowed to compete with the US, either politically or economically.
Since the only power that might be in a position to do so in the foreseeable future is the EU, the message is unmistakable. The development of the EU will be limited in such a way that it remains subsidiary to the US.
In the choice that the Government has made, we have effectively declared that this is OK with us. This is a political option with enormous implications, not just for our place in the world, but for the kind of society we will become.
By choosing Boston rather than Berlin, we have tied ourselves to the agenda of a confident, aggressive right-wing faction in the US. Seldom in Irish history can so profound a choice have been made with such little thought, either for the sacrifices of the past or the dangers of the future.