Bringing it all back home

I was one of those who marched against the war in Iraq last year. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Saddam Hussein ousted. I did. But I didn’t believe that a massive and terribly expensive war was the way to do it.

Also of course, like many I mistrusted the allegations of weapons of mass destruction given that the weapons inspectors hadn’t completed their work.
Those who marched have been vindicated, by the huge and apparently incidental casualty count as well as the plethora of deceptions, shortcuts, misdemeanours, careless attacks, wasted effort and body bags. Too many atrocities, too much spin doctoring, too much bloodshed.
Of course, there’s cause to celebrate the downfall of Saddam Hussein and his odious sons. But what is now abundantly clear is that the Bush administration in particular, but also the British war cabinet, catastrophically miscalculated what would happen after they won the war.
Victory was achieved with ease. But was this because the Iraqis were weak and demoralised or because their strategy was to suck the invaders into a long guerrilla war? Bush’n’Blair thought the former. But the Iraqis always said the latter. The result? Winning the peace has proved dismally beyond the occupying forces. Civil war looms.
So where are we now, those of us who marched and those who didn’t? Now that Iraq has been shocked and awed and bombed into the Stone Age (down even to innocent wedding parties), now that it is imploding as a country and as a society, and now that Saddam is captive someplace very secret, where do we stand?
We tread a wary and sometimes duplicitous line on neutrality. We’re more neutral for some than others, and have always been. We speak with many, rather than forked, tongues
Have we no principles? Perhaps… but it could be that we’ve just mastered the art of riding two horses at once.
Let’s take Sinn Fein as an example. This party opposes the war. Some of its leading figures even see parallels between the occupation of Iraq and the presence of the British army in Northern Ireland.
But have they made these views known to their Irish-American supporters who contribute so generously to their campaigns?
It’s unlikely, especially since so many of these individuals harbour strong pro-war sentiments and indeed have castigated the queasiness of Irish policy on the invasion of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
Sinn Fein condemn the mistreatment of prisoners by the Americans and compare this with incidents in Northern Ireland as well. That Saddam Hussein presided over an even worse prison regime is incidental, it seems. Not only that, but their kith and kin in the IRA committed a wide range of grisly war crimes, worse by far than most of those committed by the Americans in Iraq.
But in fairness, it’s not just Sinn Féin who swing both ways. While, as Mary Harney might jauntily say, in many respects we remain closer to Boston than Berlin, we’ve done our best to keep our weather eyes looking in both directions. Little wonder that betimes we seem cross-eyed.
We are the same with regard to Irish nationality. Like the Germans, we operate the blood lines approach – the fabled grandparent rule, for example – and like the Americans we recognise anyone born here.
So, we embrace our own diaspora… and every other diaspora as well. Small wonder that quarter of a billion people world-wide regard themselves as Irish. Irishness itself is a debatable proposition. But I digress.
Certainly, it’s easy for the opposition and the anti-war coalition to criticise both the US and British administration for their conduct of the war and also the Irish administration for their tangler’s mix of quiet support and occasional disquiet.
But the Government can argue that they have a difficult path to tread. They have to maintain good relations with the Americans and British as well as the Muslim world. They have to acknowledge the close family connections with America while assuaging Irish electors’ fears and angers. They have to deal with the world as they find it while also paying due respects to considerations of human rights and world peace.
Furthermore, they might point to the announcement that, along with other inward US investment, Intel is to set up a new facility to make a new generation of microchip as proof of the acuity with which they discharged their brief.
It’s a sustainable view. But is that the sum of our ambitions? Given the esteem in which we are held internationally and our current presidency of the European Union might our aim not be higher?
Perhaps. But here’s an axiom that we all might usefully remember – concentrate on what is within your control, not what is outside your control. We can’t change the world, just the bit we are ourselves responsible for.
There is a great deal that we can’t change and we shouldn’t flay ourselves for that. But we can give voice to other ways of solving the war. We can articulate a more convergent and just approach to resolving global conflict. And above all we can keep arguing that ending global poverty will help end global conflict.