US actions around the world are subject to the most vicious misrepresentation in Ireland, writes George Dempsey
What sort of response to your book are you hoping for, the journalist asked? Outrage, I said. The Irish people have been badly served for more than two decades now by the foreign policy debate which prevails in their country, a debate dominated by a self-justifying leftist fixation on the United States, and they need to know that this radical leftist dominance has been so controlling that the Irish Government has simply conceded the terms of the public debate, wishing little more than to keep its head out of the firing-line.
My book, From the Embassy, tackles the vicious misrepresentation in Ireland of American foreign policy on the basis of a half-dozen case-studies. Drawing on my own experiences as a professional American diplomat for two-plus decades, I set out what in each instance our policy was and what we did and I contrast this to the Irish misrepresentation of it.
For instance, I describe our support for democratisation in Spain following on Franco's death. Specifically, I detail how the negotiations for renewal of our long-standing military bases agreement with Spain were designed, in close co-ordination with the US Senate, to demonstrate publicly our support for the bringing of democracy to Spain.
I then cite Garret FitzGerald's characterisation of the renewal of this agreement (in his memoirs) as support for the Franco regime in "its closing stages". In fact, the negotiations were intentionally not completed until some two months after Franco's death.
Many other misrepresentations were not so innocent. Typical there would be any number of condemnatory assertions stemming from the Gulf War such as that the US "armed" Saddam, enabling him to invade Kuwait, or that the depleted uranium used in munitions by the US were causing widespread cancers in Iraq by entering the food-chain, or that it was the UN sanctions-regime which was the cause of the misery of the Iraqi people in the post-war period, in particular the deaths of countless Iraqi children due to lack of medicine or food.
That each of these assertions was factually untrue was evident from readily-available sources. During the Gulf War, Irish newspapers ran graphics - from such authoritative sources as Jane's Defence Weekly - demonstrating that Iraq's military had been armed by the Soviet Union, with Saddam obtaining additional weaponry from such countries as France and South Africa; none came, directly or indirectly, from the US.
Irish scientists pointed out in articles and letters that depleted uranium cannot enter the food chain or water supply - it is not biodegradable. Finally, reports from UN officials responsible for the Iraq "oil-for-food" humanitarian programme made it clear that it was not the sanctions-regime but Saddam's manipulation of it which was causing the sufferings of the Iraqi people. As Brian Cowen reported to the Dáil in October 2001, the UN programme would, otherwise, have provided Iraq with the financial means to "fully" meet its food and medicinal needs.
However, Irish editors have continued to allow their writers, not just their opinion columnists, but also their news writers, to make such untrue assertions. This is not criticism of the US. This is vilification designed to portray America as a brutal country, at best indifferent to other people's suffering and, at worst, actually seeking to cause such suffering and death. Such baseless slurs determine the very structure of the Irish foreign policy debate and have destroyed its integrity.
A decade-and-a-half ago, Seán Donlon, a former Irish ambassador to the US, warned about allowing "a spirit of anti-Americanism" to so dominate the foreign policy debate in Ireland as to set the agenda for the conduct of the Irish-American diplomatic relationship. His warning had no discernible affect.
I also confront the question of why so many Irish commentators are so determined to cast the US as a sinister international bully. I am not particularly satisfied with the answers I have come up with. Certainly, there is a large element of small-country resentment. And there are elements of self-justification for Ireland's own powerlessness to effect significant results on the international scene, of self-fulfilling "folk-memories" of Ireland's colonial past, and even a residue of the counter-cultural anti-Western mind-set dating from the university years of those now in positions of influence.
Certainly, malign causes - notably, true-belief in varieties of Marxist ideology - are now as nearly absent in Ireland as they are elsewhere in the Western world, but the reality remains that, in its self-righteous leftist bias, the prevailing Irish commentary on American foreign policy constitutes precisely the same sort of abdication of critical integrity as evidenced, for instance, in the right-wing claims in the US that China was "lost" because of a worldwide communist conspiracy of which President Truman was a conscious agent.
What, then, would American foreign-policy makers like to see at play in Ireland? Honesty and fairness. They would wish the critics of American foreign policy to make a good-faith effort to understand what we have done and why we have done so, and that they base this effort on demonstrable facts and draw their conclusions from the facts in a fair-minded and logical manner.
All of this requires the recognition that human beings are fallible and that politics involves hard and imperfect choices about the uses of power. It also requires the commonsensical recognition that, until human beings turn into angels, there remains the ongoing need for violence. Human rights are secured by the rule of law which is secured by enforcement.
George Dempsey is a former US diplomat in Ireland. His From the Embassy - A US Foreign Policy Primer is published by the Open Republic Institute (www.openrepublic.org)