OPINION:We should be acting in solidarity with people who reject the warmongering policies of Bush, writes Richard Boyd Barrett
IT IS now five years since the US-led invasion of Iraq. It is an appropriate time to take stock of the consequences of that invasion, wider US-led foreign policy, and re-examine Irish foreign policy in this global context.
Rory Miller ( Opinion and Analysis, February 26th) suggests Ireland has been "too reluctant to address the global foreign policy challenges since the 9/11 attacks on the US".
He proposes that Ireland commit troops to support the US-led occupation of Afghanistan, which he refers to as the "rebuilding of a ravaged country", and "assist the US" in its "massive peacekeeping and nation-building project" in Iraq. He warmly welcomes the decision to send Irish troops to Chad.
Firstly, Ireland is already deeply complicit with the US war machine by allowing over a million US troops through Shannon.
Ireland is complicit also by allowing CIA-chartered aircraft, known to have been involved in so-called rendition of prisoners (ie torture), through Shannon since the start of the Iraq war.
But surely further support for US foreign policy is a bizarre conclusion to draw from the experience of the last five years.
The US-led Nato mission in Afghanistan is not "rebuilding" a "ravaged country". It is Nato that is doing the ravaging.
Some 1,600 people have been killed in the last four months in the ongoing Nato war. Tens of thousands have died since the invasion in 2002. There are three million refugees living in tents and 6.6 million Afghans do not get minimum food requirements.
Some 30 per cent of Afghans have no access to clean water and one in eight children dies as a result. One in five children dies before the age of five and one Afghan woman dies in pregnancy every half-hour.
Life expectancy has fallen from 44.5 to 43 since the Nato invasion. Literacy rates have also fallen, while opium production and addiction have gone through the roof. On almost every index, Afghanistan is worse off now than when the US attacked.
The picture in Iraq is even worse. Opinion Business Research recently published a survey estimating 1.2 million deaths in Iraq since 2003 as a result of the invasion.
This confirmed the Lancet medical journal's similar estimate.
US air strikes in 2007 increased 500 per cent on the previous year. "Nation-building" and "peacekeeping" it seems are now defined as increasing bombing runs from 729 in 2006 to 1,447 in 2007.
In January this year, for example, six US bombers dropped 40,000lbs of bombs in 10 minutes on a Baghdad suburb.
Iraq is also now the scene of the biggest refugee crisis in the modern history of the Middle East. There are approximately 4.5 million refugees (one-fifth of the county's population) internally or externally displaced. The number of people fleeing their homes jumped dramatically during the period of the supposedly successful US "surge".
Alan Greenspan, former director of the US Federal Reserve, recently explained the real reason behind the US invasion of Iraq. He said: "It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows - the Iraq war is largely about oil."
When the anti-war movement said this in 2003 we were accused of being conspiracy theorists.
The connection between oil and war brings us to Chad and Darfur. Certainly, China is cynically arming a nasty regime in Sudan because it wants Sudanese oil and influence in the region.
What is not being mentioned as much is that France and the US are backing an equally rotten regime in neighbouring Chad for the same reasons. The French-armed and US-supported regime in oil-rich Chad is also backing rebel groups in the bloody Darfur conflict.
So Irish troops will be backing the French in a nasty proxy war and Irish troops could well pay for this with their lives.
The US is now also provoking a new arms race by building its missile defence shield in central and eastern Europe. This has provoked Russia to develop a new nuclear missile system.
In reality, the shield is part of a US/Nato policy of political and military encirclement of Russia and what US historian, Stephen Cohen, called a "new cold war"
The provisions of the Lisbon Treaty that tie the EU closer to Nato will in turn involve the EU and, therefore, Ireland in this dangerous military rivalry.
Ireland should have no part in supporting the US or big powers in Europe that want to use military force to grab control of natural resources or further their geo-political interests.
We should be acting in solidarity with the overwhelming majority of people in the US and worldwide who reject the warmongering policies of Bush and his allies.
This begins with excluding US troops involved in war and CIA torture flights from Irish airports and joining the global anti-war protests planned for Saturday, March 15th.