At a party in Port Huron, Michigan, 12 days ago, a psychiatrist, originally from Crumlin, Dublin, and his American-born wife, complained that on returning to Ireland in recent years they were obliged to listen to sanctimoniousness about US foreign policy, with the sub-text that the US is morally degenerate and Ireland morally righteous, writes Vincent Browne.
Both were opposed to the invasion of Iraq and the American woman said she intended to vote for John Kerry in November. It was not so much the content of the criticism they faced when the visited Ireland, it was the tone.
I was a little surprised. I thought the tone of moral self-righteousness was the preserve of a few of us Irish Times' columnists. It's what we do best. But now this is a general infection?
So to the tone factor and US foreign policy, or more especially the American war on Iraq. I opposed it on several grounds: it involved the inevitable killing of innocent people and, I argued, that, on its own, made the war unjustifiable; Iraq did not and could not pose an immediate or even proximate threat to the US, the Middle East or the world as the Bush administration claimed; the invasion was likely to result in a massive humanitarian crisis, involving the killing of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, and the death and suffering of hundreds of thousands of others.
Even apart from these considerations, the US was hopelessly morally compromised in aiding and abetting Saddam Hussein when it suited it, even approving of his use at the time of biological weapons and giving him the green light to invade Kuwait. The US was motivated not primarily by humanitarian concerns but by geopolitical considerations and, of course, oil. In acting unilaterally, and in defiance of the UN Security Council, the US was weakening, perhaps fatally, the brittle international legal order.
I think in retrospect I have to back off from some of this. I have changed my mind about the illegitimacy of a war solely on the basis that, inevitably, it will result in the loss of innocent life. Had it been possible for the US airforce to shoot down the second plane that crashed into the Twin Towers on 9/11, wouldn't it have been moral (that word again) to do so, even though it would have resulted directly in the taking of innocent lives. And I don't think this point is weakened by the certainty of the imminent death of these people.
I think I was right about Iraq not posing an imminent or proximate threat to the US, the Middle East or the world, but maybe I was too dismissive of American anxiety that a rogue regime might ally itself with a terrorist organisation to further their joint project of injuring the US. Maybe at some stage Iraq could have assisted al-Qaeda in getting its hands on nuclear weapons, in which case Iraq would have posed a massive threat (I think this is far-fetched, but it is not or was not unreasonable for many Americans to fear that. My own view is that if terrorists get their hands on nuclear weapons, they will do so via leakages from the Russian nuclear arsenal).
I and others were certainly wrong about the scale of the disaster that would ensue from an American invasion. Sure, the aftermath of the conflict has been worse than the Americans themselves predicted, but the anti-war predictions of hundreds of thousands of fatalities have proved hugely exaggerated.
As for the moral compromise argument, are all of us who are morally compromised disbarred for ever from acting against malign forces? Is the US precluded for all time from doing what it thinks it needs to do to defend itself, because of the delinquency of previous administrations?
On the mixed motives issue, don't we all have mixed motives for all our actions, so why take it out on the US? And on the issue of the international world order - well what international world order? And, anyway, will this not teach the US a lesson, so what are we worried about?
But us sanctimonious moralists are not out of business quite yet.
There is something the US could do to secure its safety in the long term. It could defuse Islamic anger through measures it should enact anyway: get out of Iraq within a year and after democratic elections (if a new democratically legitimated government needs help with security, it should get it through a UN-mandated force); get out of Afghanistan; withdraw support from the corrupt Saudi Arabian regime; and, above all, behave even-handedly on the Israel issue, requiring Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders and stop the abuse of the Palestinian population.
But this will not happen. There is no political will in the US to restrain Israel. There is no impulse, at least for now, to get out of Iraq or Afghanistan as soon as possible. There is fear that the withdrawal of support for Saudi Arabia will result in a fundamentalist regime there. But a spoonful of moralising does not make the medicine go down.