Of all our faculties, memory must be the most unreliable. Who, stuck in the midwinter miseries of the past few days, could recall the physical sensations of a hot summer's day? When your feet are cold and wet, can your body remember what it is like to be paddling in warm waters, with sun on your shoulders and the trickle of sweat on the brow? You can describe these sensations, but the memory is merely able to record that such things happened to you. What they actually consisted of, what the reality of heat is like, how the physical comforts of midsummer fill the mind with ease and the torso and limbs with a sensuous glow - why, these are as great a mystery to us in November as are the innermost thoughts of a frog chortling on a lilly-pad at midnight in the Midi.
Grey misery
Who was not astonished at how utterly terrible cold and rain proved to be when they returned with such baleful intent the other day? Bleak, lightless, grey, penetrating: misery in all its physical forms seemed to ambush us. And though we should, by God, all be able to remember what an Irish winter consists of, it invariably surprises us nearly as much as it would a party of Indians as it befell them in their canoe on the Amazon.
For the mind cannot store the discomforts of abominable weather. All it does it to put aside a few words to describe it. So we never fail to be appalled and astonished by its reality of winter, though the seasons, and the extremes they contain, are not that far apart. Yet despite this, and the ferocity of the sensations of winter when they occur, we are almost completely unable to remember them the moment they are gone. Our utter inability to remember yesterday's cold and rain is confirmation of the poorness of memory. Yet humans pride themselves exceedingly on the efficacy of this thoroughly infirm faculty. Is it any wonder, therefore, that with memory alone to steer us, we repeatedly fly into mountain-tops which are already littered with the shattered remains of earlier and similarly-guided aircraft?
Is this what all those well-meaning people who are flocking into Baghdad are doing? Are they amnesiacally repeating the very errors which well-meaning people have so often made when it comes to dealing with tyrants? For just as they cannot remember how dreadful is the cold of winter, nor can they recall the abominations of lawless tyranny, least of all because they have only theoretical knowledge of it.
Of course, it is appalling and inexcusable that so many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children have died in the past 10 years: but it was not United Nations sanctions which brought about their deaths, but the manipulations of the Iraqi economy by Saddam Hussein, for the very purpose of gaining the support of the well-meaning and the decent, the very people who have been pouring into Iraq in recent days.
Secret police
There is not a more unspeakable brute in the world than Saddam. He is a monster who ruled by murder, whose secret police governed by torture and rape, whose army used poison gas and genocide to quell unrest. His son and heir Uday is cut from the same homicidal cloth as dear old Dad.
And what family values dear old Dad actually lives by. It is only five years since his two daughters and their husbands, brothers Hussein and Sadam Hassan, fled to Jordan, but they were enticed back with a pardon. Hussein and Sadam, and their blameless father, were then promptly murdered. Here is a line of Orwellian double-speak uttered by their killers to justify their fate: "The free pardon which the state granted them does not spare them punishment."
As if to show that he too has much promise as the next dictator of Baghdad, Uday Hussein even murdered his bodyguard; and if he does that to the man who is sworn to protect him, what does he do to those who are sworn to oppose him?
Now merely because people have forgotten how monstrous Saddam's regime has been when largely unfettered by world attention doesn't mean that it has changed for the better, any more than the brutal realities of our winter have vanished for ever simply because we have trouble remembering them upon a sunny day in July.
Have we forgotten the Marsh Arabs, the Kurds? President Bush's calls for them to overthrow Saddam ten years ago, though he was not prepared to help them in any way, were disgracefully irresponsible, they were so desperate that they did indeed rise. What happened to those who did take arms against Saddam and were captured? Where are they now, as Saddam's astute policies are finally wrecking UN sanctions?
Propaganda
I do not fault Niall Andrews for trying to assist in the breaching of those sanctions by taking a plane full of medical supplies to help the children of Iraq - but is he sure his mission will not be used for proSaddam propaganda? Certainly, less worthy motives than his have caused some 1,500 foreign companies to join the current international trade fair in Baghdad which the Iraqi government is, with some justification, crowing over.
Saddam is a monster. His son is a monster. With events in Jerusalem seizing our attention, it is as easy to forget that truth as it is upon a summer's day to forget the horrors of midwinter; yet they will return. And so, almost with equal certainty, will the Husseins.