John Pentland Mahaffy's Unionist bones must have been spinning in disbelief in their Mount Jerome grave last week as they listened to the debate from the Duke of Leinster's old home, wrties Kevin Myers.
It has long been a source of some distress to those bones that the Duke's house has been residence to the schismatic parliament which has (in Mahaffy's view, temporarily) seceded from Westminster. It was always their hope that the Irish people would one day see the error of their ways and return to the docile loyalty to which the three Crowns of the United Kingdom were entitled.
The defence of the union was foremost in Mahaffy's heart. This was why, as vice-provost of Trinity College, he barred a meeting to be addressed by, among others, "a man called Pearse", because of the latter's anti-recruiting campaign. The meeting went ahead anyway outside the college. Two years later, "a man called Pearse" led the 1916 Rising, which was opposed by armed student-cadets of TCD. Mahaffy never lived to see the melancholy outcome to the Rising; he finally made provost and died in 1919, no doubt comforted by the doughty loyalty of his Trinity students.
The cadaverous remains were also surely much heartened by the enduring loyalty of Trinity students in 1945 as they waved union jacks on VE day. That Iberian traitor de Valera might be "teeshock", or whatever the absurd expression was, and he might have offered his condolences to the German legate on the death of that upstart bounder, Adolf Hitler, but Trinity was still true. Trinity was loyal. Trinity remained faithful to the old order.
Well, it apparently did - up until last week, when the entire world was turned upside down in the course of a debate in the "Seanad" (in the Duke of Leinster's scullery). Trinity College has two elected members there: these surely could be relied on to defend the United Kingdom at a time of adversity. Yet one of those senators - and a Protestant, no less - called the present prime minister of the United Kingdom a liar, the most inexcusable word in any parliament. That was confusing enough, but not as confusing as what followed; for then a political heir of Pearse and de Valera, Senator Paschal Mooney of Fianna Fáil, sternly rebuked the member for Trinity for speaking disrespectfully of the elected leader of a friendly country. At which point the old Mahaffy bones began to perform a positive fandango of disbelief.
Well, sometimes things change in wholly unexpected ways. It will come as bleak comfort indeed to the Trinity senator to hear that I think he was right in his terminology. Alistair Campbell oversaw the media campaign in support of the war in Iraq (Mesopotamia, Provost), but authorising the creature Campbell - apt that name in the Gaelic, for it means "crooked mouth" - was Blair. A bodyguard of falsehoods was created to justify the war option: this was morally, politically and legally wrong. A democratically elected leader can only properly take his nation to war on grounds of irrefutable truth.
There were - as we now apparently know - at the time of the invasion nearly a year ago, no weapons of mass destruction. The existence of such weapons was the declared reason for the invasion. Dossiers were compiled to create the impression that Saddam Hussein's scientists were working on weapons of mass destruction - including one plagiarised from an ancient thesis lifted from the Internet. By omission and commission, Blair - and that wretched creature Campbell - misled the British people.
For that they should be impeached.
But, as even David Kelly thought, the US and Britain were right to go to war. After September 11th, we cannot have rogue states living in conspicuous and violent violation of the UN. Saddam Hussein had been doing just that for years, laughing off sanctions while his people died by the thousand. Moreover, we know he'd had weapons of mass destruction before, and had used them to genocidal effect. The world did not act then; but this should not mean that we should settle for a policy of consistent inaction towards evil.
We heard much fatuous stuff last week from Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch. He declared that the US-led invasion was wrong because, though Saddam had engaged in "ethnicidal" actions in the past, killing at least 250,000 Iraqis, no such mass killings were taking place when the allies invaded. In other words, past genocides must be forgotten. You have to have an army waiting on a known genocidalist's borders, poised to pounce, but only when the genocide resumes. Meanwhile, your army waits - one year, two years, three years. . .
The argument of those opposed to the war is that there were other ways of deposing Saddam; but all others had been tried. None succeeded. (Kenneth Roth's suggestion that some international court could have brought the Ba'athist regime toppling down is on a par with Malawi's space programme).
Since the end of the second World War, no more morally justifiable war has been fought than that to overthrow the vile and pestilential regime of Saddam Hussein. To be sure, fresh problems have emerged; but to have taken no action does not absolve the world of the law of consequence.
Inertia towards evil is in itself a deed. The first Gulf war was the consequence of the world standing by during the genocide of the Kurds. The days of democracies waiting for criminal regimes to act before acting to defend themselves ended on September 11th. Even Mahaffy, now, understands that.