Last week saw a series of dispatches arrive from the States - home thoughts to abroad, as it were, writes Anthony Glavin
The first came from an old college classmate called Tom, a redoubtable mid-westerner who once drank with Jack Kerouac, and still swims in near-freezing waters, though he says he has yet to take up swimming under ice. His chance encounter with two Irish women on a crowded train from Chicago, Illinois to Gary, Indiana is what prompted him to write, captivated as he was by "their chapter and verse insight into centuries of insurrection, invasion, and subversion", that nightmare of Irish history as James Joyce more or less famously described it. But what particularly caught Tom's ear was their simple eloquence concerning Northern Ireland, and "that moment in which a people turn from blood to reason".
Not surprisingly, their train-bound conversation eventually turned to that Middle East nightmare in the making, the current conflict in Iraq - a war in which Tom's seatmates wished the US well, while being puzzled that so many Americans cannot see as clearly as Europe who the actual winners are likely to be.
I also spoke last week to Kevin, an old Dublin pal and one-time Grafton Street busker, now living in Indiana. Recently he saw in a local cinema the Irish film Once, a marvellous story about a contemporary Dublin busker and an immigrant street vendor/pianist, which he confessed moved him, that far from home, to tears. Our talk then turned to this and that, before eventually finding its way to the political state of his adopted country where, even in a traditional Republican heartland like Indiana, you now see bumper stickers proclaiming: "January 2009-The End of an Error".
Unfortunately, the end of the Bush presidency is not likely to bring an end to the suffering in war-torn Iraq, where the civil war set in motion by the US invasion looks to drag on despite the presence of 160,000 US troops, few of whom will be coming home until 2009 at the earliest. And while Americans lament the loss of more than 3,800 US soldiers to date, you will see scant, if any, mention in the US press of studies, both American and British, calculating that anywhere from 250,000 to 660,000 Iraqis, most of them innocent civilians, have died since February 2003.
Good friends, even with sombre tidings, seemingly touch base in threes; and so word of home also arrived last week from Jim, a fellow Irish-American and former US Navy Vietnam-war resistor, who once sued President Nixon's Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird. Now he lectures around the world on peace studies. But it was Iran, not Iraq, that was on Jim's mind, as the two-year-old march by the Bush administration towards war with Teheran quickens pace: an increasing number of commentators are convinced there will be air strikes on Iran before next spring is out.
Among those observers is Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst and iconic anti-Vietnam war campaigner, who in 1971 leaked what became known as the Pentagon Papers, detailing the hypocrisy and lies behind the Nixon administration's determination to continuing waging another misbegotten war which, as Ellsworth revealed, they already knew they had lost. However, the difference this time around is Ellsberg's frightening contention that a coup has already effectively been carried out against the US legislative and judicial branches by the Bush administration, which has Iran now clearly in its sights.
Even scarier is Ellsberg's fear that the aftermath of war with Iran may see the emergence of something resembling a US police state, with a total suppression of political dissent, to the point of using detention camps or, if you prefer, "temporary detention facilities", for which a Halliburton subsidiary was awarded a $385 million contract in 2006.
Coup or no coup, the slim Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress are doing little if anything to counter the war drums from the White House. On the contrary, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck a provision from a war-funding bill requiring Bush to seek congressional permission before launching any attack on Iran. And only 22 senators voted against a recent resolution calling on President Bush to declare a division of Iran's Revolutionary Guards a "terrorist organisation" - a resolution that many fear will bolster Bush's case for war.
Of course the elephant in the room at which nobody in Congress will point is Israel - or, more specifically, the powerful lobby of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, whose concerns over Iran's legitimate pursuit of nuclear power and its alleged illegitimate nuclear weapons programme have helped to shape the current agenda on Iran. Indeed, any public discussion of the possible influence of Israel on US foreign policy almost invariably provokes charges of anti-Semitism, even at those Americans who, like myself, see an attack on Iran as being in Israel's worst long-term interests.
It beggars belief that the US, having made such an unholy mess of one war, would willingly plunge us into an even wider conflict, and this time against a far more formidable foe. Indeed, most fellow Americans I talk to cite the budget-busting debacle in Iraq as the very reason Bush and Vice-President Cheney won't do something so patently daft, deluded and dangerous as to attack Iran.
Here's hoping then, to echo two Irish women on a Chicago train, that blood turns to reason in time.