Ah, the exquisite torment of the Government having to decide on which European Battle Group to join. Neutral Sweden and Finland are joining a battle group with Nato members Estonia and Norway, which is not a member of the EU, writes Kevin Myers
Austria, which is neutral, is joining a battle group with Germany, which nearly 70 years ago gobbled it up, and with the Czech Republic. During the second World War, the Czechs were subject to the tender ministrations of the SS, an early experiment in Austro-German battle groups, costing them some 350,000 lives.
Latvia raised an SS division for Germany. It will be sharing its battle group with Lithuania, which between 1922 and 1939 was in a legal state of war with Poland because of the latter's occupation of its capital, Vilnius.
And Lithuania also raised an SS division during the war. The third member of this battle group is, well, Poland, which lost millions of dead to the armies for which its fellow battle-group members raised so many soldiers.
And Germany is planning to join six battle group members, all of which - apart from Spain - it conquered in 1939-41.
In other words, we've all got our different histories, and many countries with far bloodier pasts than anything that happened between these islands in recent decades are entering common battle groups together. But that doesn't ease Fianna Fáil's agony at having to contemplate this appalling truth: that the most logical partners for us to join in a battle group are the British.
Willie O'Dea summed up all the neurosis (and the pathological infantilism) behind our military thinking last November when he said he preferred the battle groups to be known as "peace groups". Asked if he could foresee Irish soldiers working with UK soldiers in European battle groups, he said he had no objection to working with any member-state, oh no, not at all, cough cough splutter splutter, but his preference was for working with other non-aligned countries, such as Sweden and Finland.
Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Here we have two islands locked in an age-old dance, with conjoining frontiers, with the same language, with similar military cultures, and with our army officers regularly attending the British staff college at Camberley. Yet the moment the band strikes up the European battle group excuse-me, Willie is haring across the vast dance floor that is the North Sea in the search for a partner.
Why? Because of the blonde, sexy, curvaceous non-alignment you find there.
Well, the alignment of Norway and Estonia to Nato doesn't seem to trouble Sweden or Finland too much - perhaps because they are grown-up countries which are prepared to be realistic, knowing that nearness is a good basis for a battle group. But of course, in our case, nearness is the very reason we are desperately casting around for almost anyone else, not least because the old ghosts of Fianna Fáil are shrieking in horror at the thought of soldiers of the Republic serving under some British general.
But there's absolutely nothing new about that: they've done so many times before on UN duties - to be sure, not in a formal, lasting fashion such as the battle groups imply, but on tours of duty, when the soldiers of the two countries have got on together extremely well together.
There's another reason why Willie - and our precious, empty-headed neutrality - have nothing to fear from the battle groups: Willie's term "peace groups" says it all. For that is pretty much what Europe is reduced to nowadays, talking about armies as if they're knitting circles. One such circle, under UN auspices, sat around, probably discussing dropped stitches, while the Muslims of Srebenice were slaughtered. The butchery in Bosnia ended only when the war-fighting forces of the US were deployed. And if Bosnia came back to haunt us tomorrow, Europe would probably sit paralysed, yet again, waiting for the hated Yanks to bail us out.
So frankly, I don't think the battle groups will amount to much: Europe's politico-military will is too addled for that, vide Willie O'Dea. For if he were just an independent TD elected on a free-cocoa-for-old-age-pensioners ticket, his daft ideas about the purposes of armies would be merely entertaining. But he is not. He is the Minister for Defence. He should know that military groupings, by their nature, are not based on ideological grounds, but on geopolitical ones. Otherwise, we could form a "peace group" with the Little Veiled Lasses of Lourdes and the Bouncing Wimpled Belles of Bernadette to make the most virtuous military alliance in the world, and we could all chant the rosary together as the Yoruba got stuck into the Ibo again, or the Hutu the Tutsi, or whatever permutation Africa throws up next.
Why is Sierre Leone relatively peaceful - well, anyway, for the time being? Because a Royal Irish Regiment patrol there behaved like peacekeepers, and peacekeepers only, and was promptly captured by the West Side Boys. Then in went the SAS, and the paras, like war-fighting soldiers, and put paid to the West Side Boys, and that was that - to the delight of the local people.
So, yes, indeed, there is a need for peacekeeping duties for armies, ours in particular; but peacekeeping can only be done by soldiers who know how to kill, and will do so if necessary. You see, Willie, there's nothing peaceful about peacekeeping: that's why it's done by lads with guns.
Otherwise, we might as well deploy Montessori teachers and wet-nurses in our "peace groups", and call the result "neutrality".