"À la guerre, les trois quarts sont les affaires morales, la balance des forces réelles n'est que pour un autre quart," wrote Napoleon in 1808.
John Bruton, writing in these pages last Tuesday, chose to translate these words as follows: "In war, moral considerations account for three-quarters, the balance of actual forces for only the other quarter." The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations agrees with that version; but the standard translation - and one agreed on by soldiers - uses another interpretation of the French word morale which is the borrowed English sense: "Three-quarters of war turns on morale, and only one quarter on actual strength."
I am unused to seeing Bonaparte adduced as a source of morality, especially as his authority on such matters is somewhat vitiated by the context in which he was writing: his Observations on Spanish Matters. For he was about to turn Spain into a vassal state, so beginning the Peninsula Wars which were to see French soldiers roasting Spanish priests alive and turning large parts of Iberia into a wasteland.
Morale in French means both moral and morale. Napoleon knew nothing whatever of morals, but as a great general he knew a great deal about morale. His utter lack of morality is why he was the inspiration for Hitler and Stalin; small wonder that both men were role models for Saddam Hussein. How very agreeable to find this megalomaniac, who spread fire and ruin and misery from the Atlantic Ocean to White Russia, from the Baltic to the Ionian Sea, and who dementedly devised laws to govern even his remotest subject in every detail, is now being quoted as the author of a conscious moral argument against war.
But let us admit it now. There is one great victor in our current tragedy. It is Osama bin Laden. He saw Western society as divided, uncertain, corrupt. And towards Iraq, we have been all those things. This aggressive state has been the object of 18 UN resolutions to disarm fully, for over 12 years. It still hasn't disarmed, and the UN has steadfastly refused to take the necessary steps to compel it to do UN bidding.
Yet when bin Laden organised the bloodbath of the Twin Towers - a trivial episode which John Bruton didn't even bother to mention in his anti-American tirade - even he could hardly have believed his chisel of terrorism would open up so many fissures across the world.
But it did. The US and Britain are divided from most of Europe: Europe is divided within; both British and American societies themselves are divided, and dividing. And most spectacularly of all, the UN lies in ruins, its authority gone, its power evaporated. All this the work of a single terrorist gang.
So how did these pious fantasies delude us for so long: that there was such a thing as a "world community", or that the UN commanded real respect which over-rode national interest? And who now believes in "Europe" as anything other than a trading area? It clearly has no identity, no common interest, no shared morality. What made the fiction of European unity possible was always the US.
Europe was always contemptible. It never even tried to defend itself, and was quite unable to protect the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo. That was left to the Americans and the British: moreover, they did so without UN authorisation, and in violation of the UN Charter. Yet authorisation by the UN, and conformity with the UN Charter, are what John Bruton insists are necessary before a country may lawfully go to war.
Europeans who are inclined to be sympathetic to the US point of view - and I am one - do not declare moral superiority. A US-led invasion of Iraq might well indeed be historically counter-productive. And Tony Blair has admitted that only time will show whether or not he was right. But we have to ask: If on the other hand, nothing is done about Saddam now, and in five years' time, a terrorist thermonuclear device explodes in London, who is to blame?
John Bruton is, however, morally certain about his position. "Blair," he wrote, "once Europe's great hope, is in the moral sense, about to do a totally bad thing." The overthrow of a monster who has brought about the deaths of one-and-a-half million people, who used poison gas against his own subjects, who has launched ballistic missiles on three countries, who has launched genocidal campaigns against two peoples, is a totally bad thing? When I read rubbish like that, I sense once again the moral universe in which Eamon de Valera can gravely present his condolences to Herr Hempel upon the death of the beloved Führer.
Indeed, one of the more odious characteristics of Hempel-hugging neutralim is its appropriation of moral superiority, and its dismissal of different points of view as war-mongering. John Bruton typified this when he referred to Bush and Blair being "cheered on by their neo-realist media supporters in Ireland." That is a disgraceful but not surprising falsification, one which is intellectually on a par with his invocation of that great ethical giant Napoleon, with whose words on morality he then admonished us "neo-realists".
Every path ahead is tragic; and those who prefer other paths to the one I support are not my moral inferiors. We should be looking at realistic ways of escaping the cold embrace of evil which is now closing around us all, rather than using the crisis in Iraq as a platform for ego-massaging, mountebank sanctimony.