Kevin Myers: If you wanted proof of the existence of the never-never land in which a great deal of Irish thinking on the Iraq crisis occurs, it is in the apparent support given by a majority of Irish CEOs to the "German/French" line.
In other words, some 52.5 per cent of such august individuals back a policy which doesn't exist, formed by two countries with distinctly different attitudes to Iraq.
It's easy to make sense of the German policy. It's no policy at all. It's simple appeasement. The Germans have said that they're opposed to military action against Saddam Hussein, even with UN endorsement. In other words, let the orphanage burn, we don't approve of water being wasted. But despicable though the German policy is, it has the clear advantage of being comprehensible, if only for its pure infantilism.
The French policy is a hotpotch of machiavellian realpolitik, visceral anti-Americanism and absolute cynicism - because behind the scenes, French officials have been negotiating terms on which they would be allowed to participate in the war. That is why their aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, has been panting in the slips, waiting to send its Super Étendards against Iraqi targets.
But the Americans won't allow the French to participate on any but US terms, because they don't trust them. And they don't trust them because France has its own parallel agenda, of establishing itself as the West's best friend among Muslim and African countries. France, after all, is the last European country with an African empire, and imperial ambitions linger still in the Élysée.
It's not wrong for a country to have a foreign policy based on realpolitik; it's eminently sensible. But only misguided fools or people who have been breathing the nitrous oxide of neutralism could believe that the cacophony of nursery neins from Berlin and the reptilian intrigues emanating from Paris together constitute a common policy of any kind. They do not.
The CEOs of Ireland might think that inaction is better than acting; and that is simply cretinous naïvety. For there are evil consequences to their do-nothing policies, as there are to almost all policies on Iraq. No truly benign picture exists. And the worst possible outcome is the one being urged by the most ardent of anti-war protesters: that the Americans abandon military pressure, send their aircraft carriers back home, and leave the weapons inspectors to do their job in their own good time.
But the only reason why the weapons inspectors are in Iraq at the moment is because the USS Nimitz is parked in Saddam's duck-pond. And we in Ireland know about the fortunes of unassisted weapons inspectors: we have thousands of them. They're called the security forces, and they still have been unable to find the IRA's huge stockpile of weapons. The moment the Nimitz goes home to have her bottom scraped, the weapons inspectors will find themselves spending a lot of time in their hotel rooms, admiring the Baghdad skyline while Iraqi officials try to get permits to visit this site or that site, which mysteriously won't be forthcoming.
We've learnt from experience - God knows, Saddam has given us enough of it - that there's no point in deploying weapons inspectors without a credible military threat to back them up, or without insisting upon an absolute deadline for compliance. When the utterly deceitful French and the querulous Germans - and the unthinkingly well-meaning CEOs of Ireland - say he should be given more time, the reply is: well, lads, he's had 12 years.
Time is up. The US cannot wait any longer. It is not a military or a political possibility. It's matter of logistics. The US cannot keep its task force on indefinite standby in the Gulf until the autumn, or this time next year, or 2020, or whenever.
Nor can the US fight a war in the Iraqi summer, which is upon us soon. Options are therefore closing fast.
If the US were to back down without Saddam's unconditional compliance with UN resolutions, UN policy towards his criminal regime would inevitably begin to falter. Sanctions, already a failure, would soon be abandoned. Saddam and his monstrous sons would then be free to embark upon whatever lunatic ventures appealed to them next, including a strategic alliance with al-Qaeda. Improbable? No doubt. But it's certainly not as far-fetched as the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939, which made the second World War possible.
Across the world, especially in the Islamic world, the US would no longer be taken seriously as an enemy: and it was precisely this perception, created by the diseased pusillanimity of Clinton's policy towards Somalia, which allowed al-Qaeda to believe the US could be toppled by terrorism.
For the US to withdraw before Saddam is verifiably disarmed of all biological and chemical weapons would be a catastrophe, not just for the region, and for the US, but for the entire world. The UN would be finished. State terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism would be triumphant in many countries. Infant democracy in Pakistan could well undergo cot-death, and nuclear war between India and Pakistan might well follow.
This is the gravest crisis in the world since the US and the USSR nearly went to war over the Cuban missiles. All routes out of it are dreadful, save one: for the Iraqi army to overthrow Saddam and create a regime based on the rule of predictable law. That was the US's Plan A through the 1990s. It failed, and thousands of Iraqis were murdered by Saddam's terror gangs. Plan B is now upon us. What genuine alternative is left?