Ireland should have no part in the infliction of further outrage on innocent people. The decision to make airports available to the Americans, irrespective of what it is they are planning, is wrong, no matter how much we sympathise with them in their terrible grief.
If what the Americans were now about was a credible "surgical strike" against those they can show were responsible for the attack on New York and the Pentagon, that would be fine. If along the way the squalid Taliban regime was ousted in a coup in Afghanistan, that too would be fine. And even if the US, in achieving these objectives, continued to operate double standards in its dealings with regimes and crises around the world, well it would be a pity but, what the hell, you can't have everything.
However, we now know full well that the idea of "surgical strikes" is nonsense. The "surgical strikes" shown on our television screens during the Gulf War in 1991 were faked - they were part of a video presentation prepared by arms manufacturers for their sales campaign. Thousands of innocent people were killed in the Gulf War.
Three years ago, President Clinton ordered "surgical strikes" against "terrorist" targets in Sudan and Afghanistan associated with Osama bin Laden, following the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The US has since acknowledged that the target in Sudan, a chemical factory, was wrongly chosen (it had no connection with bin Laden) and the assaults on bin Laden's Afghanistan hideouts (which the Americans claimed at the time were "highly effective") involved one of these "surgical strikes" hitting the wrong country (Pakistan). If the Americans are now right about bin Laden's involvement in the September 11th attacks, it says all that is needed to be said about the effectiveness of the 1998 assault.
The pretensions of commanders of modern warfare were dented by a House of Commons Defence Committee report published last year on the Yugoslavia adventure. This showed that in the 78-day bombardment in 1999, the UK alone undertook 1,008 "strike sorties". The report states: "Of these, 244 were precision-guided weapons, 230 were gravity bombs and 531 were cluster weapons."
As i noted previously in this column, the report was curiously vague about the "success rate" of the precision-guided missiles but specific about the other bombs used. It noted a report stating that only 2 per cent of the 1,000 lb unguided (gravity) bombs could be confirmed hitting the target. It stated between 8 and 12 per cent of the cluster bombs failed to explode and were therefore left lying around on the ground in Yugoslavia. It quoted a report that only 31 per cent of these cluster bombs hit their targets and a further 29 per cent could not be accounted for.
So we know, and the war commanders of the US and UK know, that the bombardment undertaken in Yugoslavia and Iraq and, apparently, now being planned for Afghanistan, is necessarily indiscriminate and necessarily involves the taking of innocent lives, almost certainly in the thousands. And we also know that such a campaign, while it might satiate the lust for revenge and give the impression of something being done, is unlikely to "take out" the terrorists responsible for the US attack. Indeed, its most likely consequence is that similar or even more horrific attacks will take place.
Now it may be that the expectation of a repeat of what happened in Iraq and Yugoslavia is mistaken and that a more subtle campaign is under way, but does the Irish Government know that, does Fine Gael know that and, if they do know that, why are they giving a blank cheque to the Americans to use our airports to do what they like in Afghanistan or perhaps in some other parts of the world? And if they do know it, why don't they tell us?
By noon last Wednesday I had received a large volume of e-mails in response to my column of last week where, again, I argued that it would be wrong to launch an indiscriminate attack on Afghanistan (columnists here, in the UK, US and elsewhere, have had similar responses, no doubt far more voluminous in many instances).
The response was two-to-one critical, most of the adverse comment assuming that I was sympathetic to the terrorists or that I was anti-American and believed Americans had this coming to them.
Is it not impossible to admire America's extraordinary vitality, its openness, its protection of freedom of speech, its spectacular achievements in philosophy, literature, art, architecture, science, technology, drama, cinema and music, while being critical of other aspects of American life? For instance, its obsession with guns, its use of the death penalty, its inequalities and its foreign policy?
Finally to an Irishman I admired, Kevin Boland, who died on Sunday. As a minister he was unyielding, arrogant and at times almost paranoid. But he could be very funny in argument and often devastating.
As has been remarked by many others, his most outstanding quality was his integrity. He was opposed to the importation of arms in 1970 but he believed Jack Lynch was duplicitous in his dismissal of Haughey and Neil Blaney in May of that year because Lynch had earlier told the cabinet that the issue of attempted arms importation had been resolved. When asked to vote confidence in Jim Gibbons he could not do so and took his promise to vote with his party at all times so seriously that he resigned his seat to avoid breaking it.
vbrowne@irish-times.ie