One of the leading opponents of the US-led war against tyranny in Iraq is Michael Moore, author of Stupid White Men and maker of the film Bowling for Columbine. Kevin Myers has a swipe.
If you want a true measure of this man's intellect and his grasp of world affairs, this is what he wrote in Stupid White Men of Northern Ireland in 2001, revised in 2002, before the Executive was suspended because of IRA intelligence operations against it, the British, the Irish and the US:
"The British media offer a wide spectrum of editorial viewpoints. No one is left out of the political discourse in the United Kingdom. Except the Catholics of Northern Ireland. . .Catholics in Northern Ireland are second-class citizens whose rights are continually violated, who are kept on the lowest tier economically, and who live under the thumb of an occupational force of British soldiers. This has led to a lot of random killing over the past 33 years."
This is the sort of analysis which would be regarded as a little extreme even by the Real IRA, never mind Sinn Féin. To say that "the Catholics" of Northern Ireland have been excluded by the British from the political discourse of the province is so wildly wrong as to be laughable. If Moore's risible little farrago of conceit and falsehood is republished next year, it will be on the 30th anniversary of the formation of the first power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland. The IRA war had another 22 years to run: and there was very little that was random about that.
There is more rubbish like that about Northern Ireland in this silly little work ("But that hope didn't last long as the Protestants soon insisted they wouldn't share power until every IRA gun was turned in"). So this is what the man is like on territory we know about. What is he like on territory that we know something less about, but almost certainly more than him - namely Iraq? He belongs to that spectrum of opinion in the US, in Britain and here which dominates the media, which hails Noam Chomsky as an intellectual guru, and which gets everything wrong.
Why are such people so popular? They got it wrong on the first Gulf War, they got it wrong on Bosnia, they got it wrong on Kosovo, they got it wrong on Afghanistan. And they never say oops, sorry.
The same anti-US voice has been heard in the media through the 1990s, and in this country in particular, where 1960s radical chic has been put in aspic by Sinn Féin-IRA. From that source, it has disseminated through Irish life. The cross-fertilisation of the cultures of Woodstock and Easter 1916 has produced a curiously virulent but tenacious hybrid which enables ancient Irish tribalism to acquire a vaguely modern appearance and a thoroughly modern vocabulary.
There is no logic or philosophical congruence to the IRA saying it is against the use of violence for political ends. It is self-evidently ludicrous. But this is what you get when you inter-breed species. Counter-logical hard-wiring results. The pure-bred version of traditional Irish-American republicanism in the 1960s supported the US war in Vietnam: it was only after Woodstock lay down alongside Kathleen Ni Houlihan and opened her blouse that the new species of Irish republicanism resulted.
That strange creature was given free access to the White House by Bill Clinton, and naturally, because no-one told the beast otherwise, it came to believe that it could do as it liked. This sense of freedom from responsibility for its actions was deeply embedded in the new hybrid. Woodstock and Irish republicanism - and indeed Bill Clinton - share alike the deep belief that deeds should not have consequences; and if they have, that is deeply unjust.
The Woodféin cross-breed might have understood something about the world of real consequence which we all live in if it had been told emphatically that deadlines mean deadlines; that the Mitchell principles, and all the other undertakings that Woodféin signed on for, are real and binding, and the consequences of dishonouring undertakings are also equally real and binding.
But that wasn't done. Woodféin was allowed to remain in its own little world of pathological illogic: an armed organisation, which still kneecapped people, which still imported arms, which still recruited terrorists, which conducted intelligence operations against its partners in government, and which was simultaneously against violence of any kind, and which declared that international disputes should be resolved through the aegis of the UN only.
This wretched creature, the blood-soaked carnivore preaching the virtues of lentils, could not have survived naturally without being nourished by outsiders. And that is what happened. The three governments of Dublin, London and Washington took this meat-eater which insisted that it only nibbled the occasional leaf of lettuce, and publicly agreed with Woodféin declarations about its diet of carrot juice and tofu.
Not merely did Woodféin talk vegetarian; it came to be believed by very large numbers of people, especially young people, who have next to no personal memory of the Great Vegetarian War of 1970-1995, when - or so the Woodféiners, aided by fools like Michael Moore, will soon be telling us - the British tried to make delicate Irish republicans eat meat, when all they really wanted to do was nibble on nut rissoles and think peaceful thoughts, man.
There is always a harvest for lies, and soon we shall be reaping it: the electoral extermination of David Trimble and the SDLP. I await Michael Moore's analysis of the death of the peace process with bated breath.