We should tread carefully before we indulge our disagreeable habit of giving other countries little morality lectures. The primary target of such sanctimoniousness is seldom an Asian or an African tyranny, but something called "the West". And wherever intolerable atrocities are visibly being perpetrated by "non-Western" forces, we prefer to blame whatever "Western" element may be diagnosed.
Through this curious little lens, the barbarities perpetrated in East Timor came to be symbolised by the Indonesian purchase of a few British Hawk aircraft - which were in fact of little or no use in sustaining Indonesian rule there.
But the Hawk came from the "West", so therefore it proved that the "West" was to blame for East Timor's woes. Nine years ago, many people in this country got themselves into a fine old lather blaming "the West" for arming Saddam Hussein. And in as much as they sold weapons to him, the accusation was true about many "Western" countries. It was true of "Eastern" countries too. The Scud is Russian. Saddam's tanks were Russian. His air force was Russian. Today, the Russians and the Chinese continue to supply him with all sorts of military goodies, without high-minded denunciation from columnists and letter writers in our newspapers.
Beef for Iraq
Of course, we haven't got an arms industry here to protect. Telling other countries who they should sell their guns to is rather like Iceland giving advice to Malaysia on what to do with its rain-forests. So though we had no gun-factories or Hawk factories, we have grass. And when grass is fully grown, it is called beef, which we sold in vast amounts to Iraq, enabling Saddam Hussein to feed one of the largest armies and one of the most evilly repressive regimes in the world. Our farmers and our meat-packing plants made a very large amount of money helping to keep an evil man in power. We should, therefore, be slow to pronounce on the conduct of others.
But there is something so truly vile, so majestically cynical, something so wholly wicked, about the British government's decision to supply parts to keep Robert Mugabe's Hawk aircraft flying, that maybe we in Ireland should look at ways of changing European laws on such sales. Let us not tarry too long at the issue of ethics. Ethics vary by the hour - but self-interest doesn't. It is a constant. It is predictable. It is understood by all parties. Buddhist and Moslem and Hindu and Christian and Communist might differ ethically to the point of utter incomprehensibility; but their minds will reach perfect harmony on the issue of self-interest.
Self-interest
Let us be selfish. Indeed, let us be thoroughly greedy. Let us ignore the opinions of aid workers and missionaries and all those other decent people who want to make the world a better place because the Sermon on the Mount tells us it should be. Let us instead look at a far more reliable engine: our own self-interests. Which is to Europe's benefit: an Africa riven by war, dominated by ludicrous megalomaniacs and caricature tyrants, or an Africa at peace, slowly developing laws and institutions and the habits of decency and consent?
That might put the question in starkly simplistic terms. Starkly simplistic should do. Stark simplicity cuts through complex problems with the same irresistible blade that we find in self-interest. It cannot be in Europe's long-term interest for Africa to be in bloody anarchy; and one way of ensuring that the bloody anarchy endures is by feeding that anarchy with more weaponry.
There is, to be sure, a logical line of argument which declares: if we don't sell them the guns, somebody else will. But only a pathologically short-sighted self-interest will pursue that line. What is certain is that guns and planes will cause more misery in a continent spiralling into chaos. Europe should not increase that spiral, even if it benefits Europe's arms industry in the short term. Self-interest sometimes requires self-discipline. The price to be paid for the short-term profit will in the long term usually be all the higher.
Homosexuality
I don't know why the British government is permitting the sale of the Hawk parts to Mugabe - though it says something about the disordered priorities of the Holland Park lefties of London that what really disenchanted them about Mugabe wasn't the cornering of the diesel-oil reserves by his generals, even as the country's economy was collapsing without oil, or his use of the Zimbabwean airline for international shopping expeditions, or his £2 million wedding, or his lunatic war in the Congo, a thousand miles from his country's borders, or even his slaughter of the Ndebele in 1982. Nope. What did for Mugabe among the bien-pensant was his dislike of homosexuality.
Those who thought Laurent Kabila was going to bring peace - maybe even a cosy little Scandinavian democracy, with health care, roads and crΦches - to Zaire now know otherwise. No cure, no peace, no law, results from the triumph of such warlords. If it is politically possible for the European Union to make it illegal to grow food on set-aside land in Connacht, surely it is just as possible to make it illegal to sell guns to the gun junkies of sub-Saharan Africa. It is in part a question of morality: but much more importantly, it is one of self-interest.