"Mr Ahern, and perhaps a majority of the Irish people, seem to be satisfied that we were right to support the US Government in its unjust and unlawful war against the people of Iraq," wrote Edward Horgan, Commandant (retired) in this newspaper last week. To which I can only say: I'm glad he's (retired). If he thinks that the war was against the people of Iraq, then (retirement) is the proper place for him, writes Kevin Myers.
The only other person in the world to so personally identify the leader of the regime with the people whom he tortured, brutalised, oppressed and murdered is Saddam himself. This is quite an achievement. Moreover, though the commandant (retired) didn't manage to identify the purpose of the war as the overthrow of the most evil man since Mao Tse Tung, he did go on to characterise Saddam as a minor dictator.
A minor dictator, eh? He gassed thousands of his own people to death. He fired ballistic missiles into the cities of three of his neighbouring countries. He had a vast nuclear weapons programme and refined hundreds of tons of chemical and bacterial warfare agents. He started two major wars, in which over one-and-half million people were killed. He seized Kuwait in order to control its oil reserves, intending thereby to transform himself into the most powerful man in the world. He launched genocidal campaigns against minorities in his country. At his command, tens of thousands, and probably hundreds of thousands of politically suspect people were arrested, tortured and murdered.
The commandant (retired)'s piffling little letter would not be worth replying to if it didn't speak for a large number of people in this country, who still think that the Americans were wrong to go to war. Far from being wrong, this was probably one of the most morally justified wars in history. Evil, in its most pure and uncontaminated sense, in the form of Saddam and his sons, was overthrown; and a permanent force for destabilising the Middle East and hence the world was removed.
This doesn't mean that overnight Iraq will become Switzerland, and here comes Heidi with her little Basra ba-bas. Iraq is a troubled confection, the policing of which the British in particular should have some understanding of, not merely because of their own experience there, but also what they have learned from Northern Ireland. But failure of the corporate memory is one of the features of the human condition: lessons once learned, unless put into practice daily, are rapidly unlearned, and in time have to be expensively relearned.
Clearly, the British have already forgotten what they discovered in Northern Ireland about the disastrous effects of general house-searches. Having armed foreigners searching the homes of natives is always demeaning and usually catastrophically counter-productive - but especially if they're Iraqis, who are as amenable to disarmament as Texans.
Since some lessons of Northern Ireland have already been forgotten, it's hardly surprising that more distant events in Iraq have gone the same way. The forcible creation of a single state from three Ottoman vilayets, under British authority in 1920, detonated a country-wide insurrection, in which 500 British soldiers were killed and 1,500 injured in a matter of weeks. These were casualties of Western Front proportions. The response was two-fold, one civilised, the other savage.
The British deployed teams of their most intelligent officials - usually with experience in India - across the country, whose will would be enforced by the newly raised Iraqi Levies, drawn from the Kurdish, Marsh Arab and Assyrian peoples. Internal security thus became largely a matter for locals; and however much they may have disliked one another, it was far better for the rule of law and order in the new state to be in the hands of such people than of white, Christian outsiders.
The broader British response to insurgency was, to all extents and purposes, terrorist. The army was largely withdrawn, and the RAF took over security duties. Whenever there was organised Iraqi "lawlessness", Westland Wapiti bombers simply plastered the nearest village. The only serious discussion on the matter was one raised by the young air commodore in charge of operations: should civilians be bombed with 250-lb bombs, or 500-lb bombs? That officer's name was Harris; 20 years later, he applied the lessons learned in Iraq rather less successfully upon the Third Reich.
No such option, thank God, is politically possible today: but there will be many groupings hostile to the West today, as there were in 1920. Iraq is riven by religion, tribe, class, sept and clan. Many groups hate the US and the UK - and no hearts-and-minds campaign can protect the-allied forces from this homicidal antipathy. That hatred should neither cause the allies to flee in abject humility, as they would have done under the command of that priapic poltroon, Clinton, nor to stay any longer than is absolutely necessary.
Professional anti-Western journalists in the West - who have got everything wrong in the Middle East yet are still for some reason particularly esteemed by journalism students in DCU and Griffith College - sneer that the Americans thought the crisis would end with the war. This is ignorant, fashionable tripe. US thinking has always been that the war would be easier than the peace, which was why the US was so reluctant to go to war.
Now we know: hard days lie ahead for the allies. But this doesn't mean that what they have done wasn't right. It was; emphatically so.