Last Wednesday night, as hundreds of NATO bombs rained down on Yugoslavia, President Clinton went on US television to explain the mission to the American public. Concluding his remarks, he said: "Our thoughts and prayers tonight must be with the men and women of our Armed Forces who are undertaking this mission for the sake of our values and our children's future. May God bless them and may God bless America."
Thoughts and prayers for those dropping the bombs, rather than for those innocent people whose lives might be obliterated or shattered by these bombs? For those in the most sophisticated and protected aircraft warfare has known, rather than for civilians in a country already ravaged by conflict and boycott?
Tony Blair had a similarly nauseating, and in his case self-serving, reaction to the devastation that he was party to. With a tremor in his voice, he spoke of his wait for the return of the planes he had sent to drop hundreds of bombs, each of greater force than the bomb which ravaged Omagh last August, as his "longest hours". No long hours or even short hours to worry about the harm those bombs might inflict?
Clinton and Blair protest that their concern in this enterprise is entirely to stop the massacre of the Kosovar Albanians, a purely humanitarian impulse, they ask us to believe. But if their motivations are so chivalrous, how is it that, apparently, the lives and welfare of those living where they are dropping the bombs do not feature in their concerns?
Slobodan Milosevic and his regime are primarily responsible for the suffering they are inflicting on the Albanian population of Kosovo. The suggestion that NATO is primarily responsible for those atrocities, because of the response it has induced on the part of Milosevic, is an obscenity. By the same token, NATO and, particularly, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are responsible for the devastation wrought by the NATO bombs.
How can the deliberate infliction of devastation wrought by bombs, on the lives of innocent people, ever be justified? How is it that the mantra that has seeped into the moral consciousness of us Irish after 25 years of war in the North - that no cause justifies the taking of a single human life or at least the taking of a single innocent human life - be now discarded so casually and so recklessly?
And yes, it is the deliberate taking of innocent human life that is unavoidably involved in the bombing now being conducted, for that is its clearly foreseeable consequence.
Even if there were no questions about the legality of the NATO operation, or if the action now being undertaken was manifestly going to prevent more suffering and loss of life than it will cause (that must now be a questionable assumption), how can the deliberate taking of some innocent human life be justified by the saving of even more innocent human life?
Is our public morality to be defined by the crudity of a utilitarian calculation, that judges actions by their consequences rather than by their intrinsic rightness or wrongness? And if so, think of the moral blind alleys that leads us down.
We are being led down another blind and dangerous alley in condoning (that is what our Taoiseach did yesterday in Belfast, isn't it?) an illegality of such massive proportions.
Nobody speaking for NATO or supporting its Yugoslav enterprise has been able to address with any persuasiveness the legal basis for what is being undertaken. Commenting last Wednesday on the NATO bombing, Mr Kofi Annan said: "In helping maintain international peace and security, Chapter VIII of the UN Charter assigns an important role to regional organisations. But as Secretary-General I have many times pointed out, not just in relation to Kosovo, that under the charter the Security Council has primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security."
(The Security Council of course was not involved in the decision to drop bombs.)
One of the great achievements of the international world order since the second World War has been the establishment of the United Nations, and through it a mechanism for dealing with world conflicts. That mechanism has been bypassed repeatedly, of course, for instance by the old Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Afghanistan, and by the United States in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Laos and Cambodia.
But in spite of its flawed structure (with the Security Council now largely but not entirely a creature of the United States), the United Nations has been a force for stability and civility in world affairs. The subversion of that body and its charter by what is now being done by 19 of the most powerful countries in the world (the NATO members) represents a massive disservice to mankind.
Even if we were to accept at face value the protestation that what is being done is simply a humanitarian initiative to spare the lives of Kosovars, it is being done at a price of the subversion of a fragile world order. That order, however inadequately, has protected humanitarian interests throughout the world for over five decades. Its capacity to do so in the future has been damaged, maybe fatally.
But we are being asked a lot to believe that what is being done by NATO is just a humanitarian mission, untainted by considerations of power politics. If the plight of a defenceless people, brutalised by a regime bent on ethnic cleansing, is what motivates the NATO forces now in Yugoslavia, how come that, instead of intervening in Turkey to spare the lives of one million Kurds displaced in this decade alone, NATO countries have armed that state to the teeth?
If humanitarian considerations are the motivating impulses now of US foreign policy, how is it that it insists on the retention of sanctions on Iraq which lead directly to the deaths of 5,000 children a month (Madeleine Albright said this was a price "worth paying" for the destabilisation of the Iraqi regime)? How was it that all the NATO countries stood by and reneged on their commitments under the Genocide Convention of 1949 and allowed the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in three months in 1994?
Slobodan Milosevic should have been taken on in 1994 and 1995, when he invaded or assisted in the invasion of a state (Bosnia) that had won international recognition. War against him would then have had the sanction of legitimacy and it also would have spared the Kosovars the terrible brutality now being inflicted upon them. Revenge is now being exacted on Milosevic, who called the Western bluff five years ago and who, thereby, undermined the sacred military credibility of the remaining world power.
Even if this NATO initiative succeeds in dislodging Milosevic and in sparing Kosovar lives, it will be at a price that will be paid many times over in lives lost and devastated in other parts of the world because of the lawlessness that has now been unleashed.