McDowell’s view on peace march is an insult to those who took part

“UNTIL this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”

The words of Joseph Welch, the brilliant lawyer who represented the US Army against Senator Joe McCarthy's charges of communist infiltration. That couple of sentences, uttered on live television as McCarthy was attacking a young lawyer on Welch's team, effectively ended McCarthyism.

McCarthyism was essentially a political tactic. Designed to boost the career of an otherwise worthless US Senator, it consisted of making wild allegations of communist activity, usually without a shred of evidence, and using those allegations to convict people of un-American activities. McCarthyism fed the paranoia of the early cold war, it inflamed opinions in America, it destroyed careers and lives, and it wasn't stopped until it was confronted.

The essence of McCarthyism was that the truth was less important than the label.

Once a label was applied, it remained stuck. Guilty until proved innocent was the essential legal maxim behind it.

Given that McCarthyism, in that sense, turned legal standards and norms upside down, it is odd, to say the least, that the most adept and assiduous practitioner of McCarthyite tactics in our current public life is our Minister for Justice and former Attorney General. I wonder how long it will take to end McDowellism? On Sunday the Minister for Justice was on RTE, ostensibly to defend his Tánaiste in respect of remarks she had made in Limerick which had seemed to many to offer a profound insult to the 100,000 people who had marched in Dublin the previous weekend.

Not at all, said the Minister for Justice. She had made a careful distinction between the many who had marched for peace, and a rather more sinister hardcore. They had a different agenda. In many cases they were actual supporters of Saddam, he said.

He was totally amazed, he said, that a group of people who saw themselves on the left of the political fringe should support a man who butchered his own people, gassed them, who singled out at his party conference those who opposed him and had them shot. Many of those who had marched a week or so ago had opposed the last Gulf War as well, even though that had had the backing of the United Nations and was necessary to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

"And these people suddenly see him as a champion of small nations against large nations. I regard that as grotesque," the Minister said. "I agree completely with the Tánaiste that the Irish people should remember where democracy and basic morality lies in all of this. Supporting or perpetuating the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq is not a moral cause. It's a deeply immoral cause in my view," he said.

In the course of his diatribe, he co-opted Kofi Annan to his argument, pretending that Annan was on the record several times as being a supporter of the military build-up around Iraq, and that anyone marching for peace would undermine the United Nations. And he concluded by reminding us all and especially people who believe in peace that there was a similar mood in Britain in 1938/39. The implication was clear those of us who marched "for Saddam Hussein" would quite clearly, either because we were naïve or stupid or evil, have marched to protect Hitler in our day.

All of this was uttered in defence of the Tánaiste, who had earlier issued a speech which in fact had taken very little care to make any distinction between people who marched for peace and people who wanted to stoke up anti-American feeling. Her speech is available on the Progressive Democrats website (though not on her Government website), and in it she talks quite clearly about the hard left wanting to "to infect more of the centre-ground" with their "virulently anti-American and anti-EU" sentiment. And she goes on to say how concerned she is at "the stoking up of hostility to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, here in Ireland."

There's no reference whatever in that speech to the right of people to protest peacefully, no acknowledgement of the legitimate concerns of tens of thousands.

At best, the people who marched were dupes, at worst, conniving. If they had her grasp of the world and the subtleties of foreign policy, they would realise that: "With the UN and international law, it's in for a penny, in for a pound. A responsible foreign policy which upholds the rule of law can't pick and choose. There is more to international defence than sitting on the fence."

And if we all were as "mature and responsible" as Mary Harney advocates, we would accept as the driver of all our actions that: "We are a European member state. We are an open, trading country. Britain and America are among our closest friends. Let's keep it that way. Our interests lie with Europe and the US working well together. Ireland will work to maintain excellent relations with all countries in that relationship."

The Tánaiste's speech was tacky, and somewhat banal. As in a lot of her utterings, clichés were presented as if they were profound analytical arguments.

McDowell's defence of the speech, however, was both poisonous and dangerous.

I remember no-one marching against the first Gulf War. There was, at the time, huge concern at the possibility of a humanitarian catastrophe in that war, but there was at the same time a widespread recognition that Hussein had committed an act of war in his invasion of Kuwait, and that a forcible response to remove him was legitimate.

Furthermore, I know of no-one who marched "for Saddam Hussein" or who believes that "supporting or perpetuating the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq is "a moral cause." To label the people who marched through Dublin (or the million in London, or the half-million in New York) as Saddam supporters, is exactly how Senator Joe McCarthy would have responded.

McCarthy too thrived on the sweeping statement. Michael McDowell knows better than most that any comparison between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler is totally spurious. Hussein is a dictator and a tyrant, a man capable of bestial cruelty, and there is ample evidence that he has been guilty of crimes against humanity.

But does he have the resources at his disposal that Hitler had? Does he control a nation in a position to launch a war against other nations? Would his own people die for him if they had any choice? Michael McDowell knows the answers to these questions. He knows, too, that the last thing on the minds of Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney is any real concern that Saddam Hussein poses a significant threat to the world, other than the world immediately around him. For Michael McDowell to lecture the rest of us about appeasement, knowing what he knows, is an example of the kind of thing that eventually brought McCarthy down. He always knew best, and he always despised those who disagreed with him. There's a lesson in that somewhere.