"Finally, I am also sure that I am not alone in expressing my revulsion to the idea expressed by a columnist in The Irish Times that war is a reality 'where the rules binding civilisation together are dissolved, all shared commandments are suspended, all common civilities abolished, all declared decencies dissolved,' " wrote Michael D. Higgins in this newspaper recently.
"The Geneva Convention was brought into existence to protect us from such savagery."
He didn't name the columnist, which is a pity. Credit where credit is due, is what I say; the columnist was me. Moi. Mich. Is mise. And if I ended the year getting up Michael D. Higgins's nose, then the year wasn't in vain. In fact, it was a good year; and I hope to begin this one in the same vein.
"The Geneva Convention was brought into existence to protect us from such savagery." Were ever more cretinous words uttered in a newspaper of note, anywhere? Perhaps the TD for Galway West, and spokesman for the Labour Party on foreign affairs - a good reason to pray that Labour does not get into goverment this year - might remind us when the Geneva Conventions were created. They were first agreed in 1846, and various codicils and amendments have been added since.
Plains Indians
They did not prevent the extermination of the Plains Indians by the US, nor the slaughter of thousands of sepoys by the British. They did not prevent Sherman's atrocious war against the Confederacy, or Prussia's assault on France, or the murderous suppression of the Paris Commune. They did not prevent the first World War, the murder of thousands of Belgian and French civilians by the Germans, or the use of poison gas against massed infantry. They did not prevent German bomber attacks on undefended civilian targets.
They did not prevent the second World War and all its numerous joys - Rotterdam, London, Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Auschwitz, Belsen, Stalingrad. They did not save the scores of Germans captured and murdered by the Canadians at Dieppe. They did nothing for the raped nurses of Singapore, or the burning children of Nagasaki.
They did nothing for the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by US bombing in Korea, or the Hungarians slaughtered by Soviet tanks, or hundreds of thousands of Algerians or the million-plus Vietnamese killed in the post-colonial wars there. They didn't prevent. . .or do I need to go on here? All belligerent countries have felt free to depart from conventions of war when they have seen it in their interest so to do.
Atrocious business
It was not the Geneva Conventions which prevented a third world war; nor would they have governed its conduct had it happened. Only prating, sanctimonious prigs think that war can be converted into something other than what it is by a few accords in a Swiss city. War is and must remain a truly atrocious business whose atrociousness is only mitigated in certain limited degrees by the agreement of the parties concerned, usually because it is in their common interest.
Michael D. Higgins quoted my column - mine, do you hear, mine, no one else's - which I wrote in reply to his hysterical outpourings over the killing of captured Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighters. I said, and I repeat with proud unrepentance, that the US had right on its side in killing prisoners whose surrender had been accepted, but who then mutinied, killing some of their captors.
It is a universal usage in war that there can be only one surrender. You cannot then change your mind, start fighting, and expect to be allowed to surrender again. Such a surrender will never be accepted; and only in the warless, witless idyll of Galway West could one think otherwise.
A ruthless response to a false surrender is not merely a usage of war. False surrender is against - wait for it - the Geneva Conventions. Section 37 of the Protocol of December 1979 declares: "It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with an intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following are acts of perfidy. (a) The feigning of an interest to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender. . ."
Michael D. Higgins - Oh, why, pray, the D? - in his fulminations against the US of course made no mention of this part of the Geneva Conventions. Of course not: these conventions are never quoted against Communist or Islamic fascist organisations, but merely against our friends and protectors in the US.
Foreign policy
Alas, one of the defining features of this protectorate is that every strutting jackanapes in every little statelet within it thinks that not merely should he tell the US how to conduct its foreign policy, but that it should listen to him with gravity and respect. And if it doesn't, the little clown will probably puff out his chest and start spouting the usual sanctimonious bilge that people reserve for Americans. They, of course, do not have to take the command decisions which could send young American soldiers to their deaths.
And that is what is at stake here: human life, either to be taken or to be sacrificed, as in war down the ages. No protocols in Geneva have ever changed this central truth about war: when in doubt, kill the enemy.