Bush has found a stupid, drooling gun dog in this craven Irish government

national | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Tuesday March 16, 2004 11:20 by Diarmuid Doyle - The Sunday Tribune

Article first published in Sunday Tribune on Feb 1, 2004

LASTMarch, at the annual poodle show in the White House, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern stood proudly beside the American president and purred. "The world acknowledges the United States, with its immense power, and its status as a beacon of justice and liberty, as a leader with the United Nations, " Ahern said, his little tail wagging like a dachshund just rescued from a puppy farm.

His message was simple.

Ireland stood shoulder to shoulder with Bush and his regime in its planned invasion of Iraq. The reasons were simple too. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and simply had to be disarmed.

Both Ahern and foreign affairs minister Brian Cowen, the lapdog-in-chief of what passes for Irish foreign policy, were always very specific about their support for the invasion of Iraq, and for allowing armed US troops to pass through Shannon airport on their way to Baghdad. They didn't just go along with America, on the basis that Ireland and the US are traditional friends, or because they thought the Bush regime was an international bully which would urge American multi-nationals to withdraw from Ireland unless we did what we were told. They accepted, embraced and developed upon American reasons for doing so.

"Our goal is the disarmament of the Iraqi regime by peaceful means, " the Taoiseach said in the White House that March morning, implicitly accepting American claims - made in the United Nations and outside - that chemical, nuclear and biological weapons existed.

"The brutal regime in Iraq poses precisely the kind of threat to international peace and security that the UN was created to deal with." The Taoiseach had been even more loyal the previous month when he claimed that Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations had "provided the world with clear evidence that Iraq had secretly produced weapons of mass destruction. . . I think the report is strong and clear, " he said. "I think they Saddam's government know now that time has practically run out. Hopefully the Iraq regime might listen." As we now know, and as many reliable experts said at the time, Iraq had no WMDs, was not a danger to the rest of the world, and was in no need of disarmament. "I don't think they existed, " US weapons inspector David Kay said the other week, following his resignation as the head of the Iraq survey group. "I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and. . . a combination of UN inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them. I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production." Asked by an interviewer from Reuters whether he thought that the Iraqis had at some point destroyed a large programme of chemical or biological weapons development, Kay replied:

"No, I don' t think they existed." Asked what had happened to the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that everyone expected to be in Iraq, he again replied: "I don't think they existed." We know too, from the just-published biography of Paul O'Neill, Bush's former treasury secretary, that from the moment the defeated George Bush had been awarded the presidency by the supreme court, he was looking for excuses, reasons and pretexts for war. "That was the tone of it, " O'Neill says. "'Find me a way to do this'." We are also aware, thanks to assistant defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, that the weapons of mass destruction issue was chosen by the Bush regime "for bureaucratic reasons" and we have been told by Richard Perle, one of the architects of the regime's Iraq policy, that "international law. . . would have required us to leave Saddam alone".

And so they broke international law. All the reasons given by Bush for the invasion - and by extension, therefore, all of the regular yaps of support from Ahern, Cowen, Mary Harney and others - were based on lies, carefully constructed, planned in advance, cynical untruths.

The US government will have to deal with the consequences, if there are to be any, of leading thousands of people (including hundreds of its own citizens, not to mention one Irishman) to their deaths in an unjust war, but Kay's remarks are important for us in Ireland too. We are not a banana republic, despite the manner in which some of our leaders behave, and we are entitled to a foreign policy that is based on some kind of morality, some kind of honesty, some kind of thought and some kind of philosophy.

Are we now at a point in our development that we will accept any lie, hang onto any untruth and embrace any dishonesty, simply because the US asks us to? Is our independence entirely lost to us? Do we have any backbone? Is everything to be about pragmatism and nothing to be about principle?

Supporters of the war have been changing tack of late and now argue that because Saddam has been removed, the invasion was justified. I seem to recall the Taoiseach saying something of that nature recently. But even that reason is looking a bit thin these days. During the week, the New York group, Human Rights Watch, which was condemning Saddam's atrocities when he was being supported by the United States, argued that the war could not be justified as a humanitarian intervention because Saddam was not endangering the lives of large numbers of his people when the invasion began last March.

"The lack of large-scale killing is a decisive factor in rejecting the use of military intervention in Iraq, " said the group's executive director Kenneth Roth. "Such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past." Damned by its moral cowardice, and by its fear of the responsibilities of independence, the Irish government backed an illegal (see Richard Perle) and unjust (see David Kay) invasion of Iraq. By the time of the next poodle show in March, would it be too much to ask that the opposition try to bring it to heel?