Kevin Myers: I promised not to write about Iraq again this week.
Indeed, I was tempted the other day when writing my - perhaps ill-timed - piece about Tom O'Higgins, to promise not to write about the legal profession for at least a year. However, the emergence of a group of lawyers against war in Iraq has provoked me into showing how valueless my word is.
Now of course it's good that the desire for peace is so strong that the legal profession is standing four square behind it. And it's equally good to see that a march against war attracted 100,000 participants in Dublin. But why did Irish people not march when such impressive numbers would really have counted - against the IRA's atrocious war against Britain, the Northern state and Northern unionists? And why did lawyers never form an anti-war movement against the IRA campaign?
They were certainly in a position to. In many senses they were professionally active participants in the Troubles, as lawyers inevitably are in any conflict. They had their duty as officers of the court. But they also had a duty to the society at large. So do the lawyers who used all the tricks of their trade to set well-known killers free to kill again, which they duly did, now sleep easy?
Of course terrorists have legal rights; but so too do the people they will kill if they are set free. Did we hear much legal concern about the rights of future victims? And why do lawyers feel so free to denounce democracies embarking upon what I freely confess might well be a tragic and utterly counter-productive war against a remote tyranny? They certainly didn't stand up against a tyrannical and fascistic war on their own doorsteps, though they were in a real position to do so.
The issue not confined to lawyers. It goes far broader than that. For there were no 100,000-strong marches against the IRA, ever, not after Enniskillen, not after Mullaghmore, not after La Mon. I merely point to the dogs that didn't bark, and I ask: why? There was only one major anti-IRA march in the Republic through the Troubles, and that was after the Warrington bomb in 1995. It attracted perhaps 10,000 people, a tenth of the number who marched against a US-led war on Iraq. Would our own atrocious war have been halted, or at least shortened, by such vigorous displays of opposition? Who knows? Yet how heartened the Sinn Féin-IRA leadership must have been that the question remained hypothetical.
Why was this? Did fear prevent regular and public expressions of opposition to the IRA? Was it fear that caused certain barristers - but by no means all - to use their considerable forensic skills to free IRA terrorists, who were then able to kill again, but never to use those redoubtable skills on behalf of the State? Or were there other motives?
No doubt there were. But we come to something curious. A certain journalist has dubbed anti-republican columnists such as myself "Journalists Against the Peace Process". Aside from a passionate dislike of the Sinn Féin-IRA tradition, we JAPPs have something else in common: we tend to support the US position against Iraq. We do so - all of us, just about - reluctantly, for we do not like war: but when there is conflict between, on the one hand, a man who has caused the deaths of perhaps one-and-a-half million people, and on the other, some of the greatest democracies in the world, ones which have actually fought for international freedom, we feel we have no choice.
Why is this? Logically, JAPP opposition to one "needless" war should incline us to oppose another "needless" war. But of course we JAPPs, though we were opposed to the IRA war, we were not neutral in it: we backed democracy and the forces of law and order against fascist terrorism. Generally speaking, we supported the British, not because they were British, but because the consequences of an IRA terrorist "victory" would have been calamitous.
A US failure in Iraq would also be catastrophic. This is not an endorsement of US policy to date. It's simply the truth. We're in a hole. All of us. The US cannot back down now without the outcome becoming a triumph for tyranny, Islamic fascism, and Saddamic filth.
That we are in this situation is, of course, in part due to George Bush. Though he is not the moron so many unbearably supercilious Europeans have made him out to be, neither is he quite the master strategist that his defenders claim him to be. He is a Roundhead, one who has foolishly embarked on a war policy without a safe exit strategy.
So be it. The fact remains that he and the US are our natural allies. Once upon a time we built a state around the concept of a Gaelic-speaking, peat-fired economy, and then stood on our quaysides bidding tearful farewells to our young people. Then we copied US economic models, lowered taxes, inhaled US capital, and became the fastest-growing economy in Europe.
So our vital interests lie with America: we are a wherry bobbing alongside an ocean liner. But it is more than just an issue of material interests. It is also a moral one. There is simply no question: for the sake of the Iraqi people, Saddam Hussein must be overthrown. It would have been really nice to have heard the lawyers against war say as much.