Sierra Leone is so named because of the lion-like mountain range which that unfortunate country presents to the sea. It is leonine in appearance and leonine in its habits, as intruder after intruder has discovered. And for all that the British army might congratulate itself on the brilliant rescue operation of its six captive Irish soldiers there, it might just ask its political masters whether it can go home now, please, before things turn really nasty. As they probably will. The days are long gone when European soldiers could kill Africans in Africa without political consequence.
Yet killing Africans in their native country is the inevitable consequence of any foreign policy which is predicated on "doing something" for Africa. Any institutional European presence in almost any African country now is liable to hostage-taking, especially, as the Royal Irish have discovered, if they are there to interfere in the internal workings of that country. Such soldiers will need protection, and their protectors will need protection - until one day, Britain will wake up and find that, apart from the lad in the bus by outside Buckingham Palace rigidly ignoring the Japanese tourists trying to photograph the inside of his nostrils, the entire British army is in West Africa, protecting each other.
Modest coverage
It's fortunate in a way that the soldiers who were kidnapped were Irish as it might help us focus our minds - though it's equally interesting how modest was the Irish media coverage of their ordeal. Had the dozen kidnapped Irishmen - two from the Republic, 10 from the North - been priests or athletes or aid-workers or even Foreign Legionnaires, there would, I suspect, have been media frenzy over their welfare. Instead, there was a studied, almost supercilious indifference, as if an interest in what happened to these men was absolutely no business of ours: after all, they were only British soldiers.
Well, they're all well now, but at a terrifyingly high price in human life (not so speak of an odd military career or two which might not look too promising). And sooner or later the British will get out of Sierra Leone, and if they're sensible, by this weekend, though I don't see Tony Blair having the moral courage to take such an ingloriously pragmatic decision. But whenever the British leave, what will remain is that terrifying thing called a vacuum, ready to suck in the unwary. I can already hear the high-minded language which will be used to justify deploying our Army, starting at the very top, with Kofi Annan, no less.
Mercy missions
Now he is a good and noble man. But good and noble men should often be the last ones to make hard decisions about places like Sierra Leone, or about moral mercy missions of any kind (ask St Francis, who went crusading in Egypt). For what good and noble man, if asked to choose between the morally uplifting option of Doing Something or the apparently heartless alternative of Letting Them Stew in Their Own Juice, would not plump for the former?
But Europeans have been "doing something" about Sierra Leone for centuries. The state - if that is not too fanciful a term for such a behavioural sink - was invented by high-minded British moralists opposed to slavery; and high-minded moralists have been returning to raise the country up, with weary regularity, ever since. That high-minded morality has led to the bizarre outcome of rebels, who last year expressed their dissatisfaction with life in general by severing children's limbs with pangas, now being trained by Irishmen to be soldiers for Sierra Leone's new model army.
If the British do the wise thing and get out in a hurry, as the US did from Somalia a few years ago, and the UN then invites us to bring a bit of peace and order to Sierra Leone, I trust our Government will say apologetically: No. We have to see a man about a dog. Ask the Norwegians, the Nigerians, even the Chinese. But not us.
But I can already hear The High Minded Ones saying that it'll be different with our Army. It has a different culture, with more pronounced and more affable traditions of peacekeeping. But that very Irish quality of affability seems to have been the downfall of the Royal Irish, who are at all events referred to by the Sierra Leoneans as Irish soldiers. Do you think that the natives will differentiate between various sorts of Irish soldier? It is all much of a muchness to them. After all, the Irish Guards , who trained the Zimbabwean army, were enchanted to discover that their pupils thought that they were the IRA, and could we have that nice, freedom-loving Mr Adams's autograph please?
Sublime ignorance
Few if any Africans understand the complexities of Irish life any more than we understand the complexities of life in Sierra Leone or anywhere else in Africa for that matter. In our sublime ignorance, can we not agree that if anyone is to do anything of a military nature in an African country, let it be another African country? Europe has meddled too long and too often in that continent, invariably under the pretext of humanitarianism.
But that will not stop people shouting for more Irish intervention in Africa. The Chief of Staff should start preparing a paper on why this is not a good idea, and maybe brief a Ranger or two on schemes to bump off any Minister for Defence who wistfully thinks how absolutely marvellous it would be to deploy the Army in aid of dear old Africa.