Irish diplomats at the UN find themselves drinking from the trough of real politik as the Security Council decides on Iraq, writes Bill McSweeney
It has been an astonishing shift in public opinion. Just over 12 months ago, we seldom heard about Iraq. Of all the rogue states which the US government fingered in its annual list of enemies, Iraq was the most comprehensively contained, quarantined by a wall of diplomatic and military barriers to any attempt to alter its state of siege.
On a scale of one-to-10, its threat to international peace and security, measured by the expressed concern of its neighbours and the major powers, was close to zero.
One year on and the American electorate has spoken, giving the lie to those who say that liberal America is in the ascendant. The message of the mid-term elections is what Bush wanted to hear: forget the terrorists who actually organised the attack on America . . . Iraq is the new terrorism.
And now it seems that the world has been dragged rightwards by the force of great power interests to focus on the Bush agenda: the wording of a UN resolution on the conditions and timing of war. If there was some doubt before the Congress elections, there is none now. There will be a war like the world has not seen for half a century.
Saddam's regime differs from that of other Islamic countries in the region. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen, all acknowledged havens of al-Qaeda terrorism, Saddam is hostile to Islamic fundamentalism, his regime had no connection with al-Qaeda before September 11th and of the 598 suspects now detained in Guantanamo Bay, not one is an Iraqi. Why are we now on the brink of a full-scale war against Iraq?
The new imperialists surrounding Bush have made no secret of their real concern. It is not terrorism - that's just the logo on the package, not the real issue. Democracy then? The oppression of women in Iraq? Give us a break! The ideologues and oil merchants who surround George Bush and who have persuaded him to adopt their scam as American foreign policy are not moved by weepy rhetoric.
They are linked by a holy zeal for American supremacy and a corporate eye for the main chance. This is their war - a war about wealth, about power, about the oldest question in international history: who is master here?
It offends common sense for anyone still to claim that war against Iraq has primarily a security or humanitarian justification. With the flourish of a conjurer, Bush has stuck the label of "terrorism" on the map of Iraq and received the acclamation of the American electorate for his sorcery.
Behind the scenes, there have been meetings with the major US oil companies and Iraqi opposition groups, including Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and US-sponsored contender for the management of the post-war Iraqi economy.
The only reason why France and Russia have appeared as a moderating influence in the UN is that they too have billions at stake in a post-war Iraq and have no wish to facilitate the US domination of its vast oilfields. As the economic spoils of war were being negotiated, the military means were moving into place for the showdown with Saddam. No appeasers in the Security Council were going to deny this administration its war.
Any doubts were squashed by the content and tone of the first US draft resolution, making clear that it was not intended as a contribution to debate but as an ultimatum: the UN would be punished if it failed this historic test of its relevance - in effect, to mandate war
WHILE French and Russian concerns are reflected in the resolution now before the Security Council, which the US is pressing to be voted on today, the modifications do little to change the nature of the document as an endorsement of the American take-it-or-leave-it position. If the resolution is passed it can be argued persuasively that it allows the US-British coalition to go to war under a UN mandate and without further explicit decision by the Security Council.
The Undersecretary of State John Bolton made the US view clear when he said: "When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow. When it suits our interest to do so, we will do so. When it does not suit our interests, we will not."
It is a measure of how far the world has lurched to the right in the scramble to placate "the single surviving model of human progress" as Bush recently described the US, that even the liberal media now appears to accept that a vote against the US-British resolution will damage the integrity of the United Nations.
The warped logic of this idea will not be lost on Irish diplomats in New York, even as they are forced to bow to great-power demands rather than suicidally offend the US. Only recently the toast of the diplomatic world for their coup in gaining election to the Security Council, they now find themselves drinking from the trough of realpolitik. Welcome to the real world.
But Ireland also has a stake in another real world, where state greed is tempered by rules and where common interests are routinely invoked to resolve disputes between national governments. This is the European Union and it is here that Irish diplomats can help to construct a more humane order than that which the Bush administration wishes to impose and to integrate a region of the world capable of moderating the imperial designs of the US.
Dr Bill McSweeney is author of Security, Identity & Interests: A Sociology of International Relations and research fellow in international peace studies at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin.