"We are making clear what the council believes is the feeling of Dubliners, that George Bush should no longer ignore the United Nations, and look at bringing peace to Iraq," declared Kevin Humphries, Labour leader in Dublin Council. Kevin Myers urges him to "get the facts right".
He is a prime mover in the campaign to insult the US by not raising the stars and stripes during the visit of President Bush, and he is also - apparently like the majority of the council members - a blithering idiot.
So, do us all a favour please. Get the facts right. The UN is the primary instrument that the US-led Coalition is seeking to invigorate political processes in Iraq. To be sure, those processes haven't got as far as they might have done, largely because most of the primary UN officials whose task was to assist the creation of a political life in Iraq were massacred by Islamic fundamentalists last August. They weren't the only multinational body to fall prey to Islaminazis: that way too went the International Red Cross - for the first time in its history the deliberate victim of an act of war. The murder yesterday of Izzadine Saleem, chairman of the Governing Council, is a further reminder of the nature of the evil forces that the US faces in Iraq.
The man in the forefront of the attempts to bring civic order to Iraq is not an American appointee, but a UN one: Lakdar Brahimi. Do any of those preening, posturing moralists on Dublin Council know that the UN has been given the primary nation-building role in Iraq, and the only army available for that task is provided by coalition forces? Probably not. Moreover, almost no one from that abject moralistic fantasy "the world community" is offering any troops to help the coalition to ease Iraq from the nightmare of Saddism to a polity governed by the will of its people. Yet this is a great goal: aside from the defeat of Communism, one of the greatest in the world to be sought since the end of the second World War.
We all know about the monstrous abuses in Iraqi jails by allied forces. They are as relevant to the central rightness of the coalition cause as the area bombings of German cities were to the allied cause in the second World War. Was it right to overthrow Saddam? Yes, yes, yes, one hundred times yes; and in the year or so since his wretched regime perished, fewer Iraqis have been killed than in any single year of the past three decades. Meanwhile, nearly a thousand Americans, and several score Britons, and one brave Irishman, alongside his Zimbabwean friend, have provided a makeweight for the reduced loss of local life.
Deirdre Heney, the Fianna Fáil deputy lord mayor, approves of the white-flag welcome to President Bush because "it indicates the wish of people to support those who seek peace in Iraq". Good God almighty. What gibberish is this? Does she not think that the US seeks peace in Iraq? Does she - and the rest of the goody-goodies on Dublin City Council - think that the Americans like losing the lives of hundreds of their soldiers? Does it think that the US enjoys spending scores of billions of dollars trying to restore stability to Iraq? This kind of moral infantilism would almost be entertaining if the stakes were not so high.
Abu al-Zarqawi - he it was who almost certainly hacked off Nick Berg's head, slowly, from the neck to the spine - earlier this year in a letter outlined his thoughts about Iraq to his Al Qaeda colleagues. In it, he proposed a civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims. "We know from God's religion that the true, decisive battle between infidelity and Islam is in this land, and its surroundings. Therefore, we must spare no effort and strive urgently to establish a foothold in this land." He added: "Some may say that, in this matter, we are being hasty and rash and leading the \ nation into a battle for which it is not ready, [a battle\] that will be revolting and in which blood will be spilled. This is exactly what we want, since right and wrong no longer have any place in our current situation."
Maybe Dublin City Councillors should go to the trouble of looking up Abu al-Zarqawi's letter on the internet. It is a true measure of the nature of the foe which not merely the US faces in Iraq, but, rather more urgently, the people of Iraq do. The US simply cannot leave Iraq until working institutions have been created, protected by Iraqi security forces which the allies are now training in Jordan and in-theatre.
Instead of a kind of steady, sober realism finally becoming a feature of how we look at international affairs, we are back to that quivering, sanctimonious neutralism, which draws moral equivalences between the most outrageous kind of totalitarian evil on the one hand and the institutional and human failings of democracies on the other. It is de Valera offering his condolences on the death of Herr Hitler, but not that of President Roosevelt; it is Ireland sheltering behind NATO, and simultaneously and loftily condemning it.
A unilateral US withdrawal from Iraq would lead to precisely the kind of civil war between Sunni and Shia which the Zarqawi letter considers a vital in the creation of a Islaminazi state in permanent jihad against the West. And that, apparently, is the future favoured by the far-seeing statesmen and stateswomen of Dublin City Council.