Bono wants us all in global choir, but how do we find the right note?

AS THE sky grew dark over Croke Park on Monday night it all became clear.

This was more than a brilliant rock concert. It was a powerful political and cultural gathering. Over four days Bono and his associates had reached well over 200,000 people with a message about humanity and the way people should treat each other. Some might say that’s not rock, it’s gospel.

On Saturday night Bono noted the presence of Bertie Ahern and challenged him to make good on a broken promise - to reach a target of 0.7% of GDP on foreign aid by 2007. On Monday night, he welcomed Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and thanked him for his work to cancel Third World debt. Africa was a constant theme.

People were urged to join the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign and invited to take to the streets during the G8 summit in Scotland. There were greetings for Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected Burmese leader still under house arrest in her country, and there was a focus on disability. On Monday night Bono paid a moving tribute to author Christopher Nolan.

U2 has always sold its political message with force and artistry. But it was never so varied, so insistent and so urgent as now. ‘Revivalist’ might be the best word to describe it. Bono might be the preaching kind. But as with all great preachers, the performance never suffers.

On this Vertigo tour, the band’s big idea is co-existence: harmony between people, nations and continents. The word ‘coexist’ appears on a giant screen - the ‘c’ represented by the Islamic crescent, the ‘x’ by the Star of David and the ‘t’ by the Christian cross.

But while Bono is spot on with his exhortation to ‘coexist,’ the world remains in a quandary as to how to do it. Last weekend’s elections in Iran have made the problem worse.

Iran’s new president is a hardliner - the former Mayor of Teheran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Already he has vowed to continue with his country’s nuclear weapons programme. For once, Western leaders are united in their dismay.

In fits and starts, Iran has been building nuclear fuel-producing facilities which it claims will only be used for peaceful ends. But the Americans and Europeans are worried that these facilities can easily be used for weapons production. The development of an Iranian nuclear-powered reactor is well under way. And there are plans to produce highly enriched uranium. Although this process is less advanced, it is more troubling to US and European negotiators because it would bring Iran much closer to becoming a nuclear military power.

But many people in the West do not fully see the gathering cloud. The Associated Press portrayed the final election run-off as a battle between a ‘moderate,’ ‘pragmatic’ former president, Rafsanjani, and his ‘ultra-conservative’ rival, the mayor of Teheran. The New York Times reported that, if Mr Rafsanjani lost, ‘hardline anti-Western forces’ would have a monopoly on power. But Rafsanjani himself was the father of Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. “When the Islamic world acquires atomic weapons,” he told a crowd in December 2001, “the strategy of the West will hit a dead end - since the use of a single atomic bomb has the power to destroy Israel completely, while it will only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.”

If this is what the so-called ‘moderate’ is like, what can we expect from the hardliner? Perhaps more worryingly, Iran has allies who should know better. Rather than slow down or stop Iran’s bid to join the nuclear club, Russian President Vladimir Putin has effectively launched a nuclear alliance.

Russia has an $800 million contract to build Iran’s first nuclear reactor and to provide all the nuclear fuel it needs. The facility is now 84% complete and is expected to come on stream next year. The Russians have plans to build five more reactors in the country and have trained more than 1,000 Iranian nuclear scientists.

This is where well-meaning liberal people have to do a bit of soul-searching. Why shouldn’t Iran have the economic benefits of nuclear power, they may ask. Or if it comes to that, why shouldn’t Iran have a nuclear deterrent? If the US, Britain and China have it, isn’t it little short of racism to oppose nuclear weapons for the Islamic world? That’s not an easy question. There are no rational grounds for distinguishing between countries entitled to keep their nuclear weapons, and countries not entitled to develop them.

NO RATIONAL grounds except survival, that is. This is our quandary. Nobody knows what will happen if countries like Iran are allowed to develop nuclear weapons. And we are desperately weakened by such uncertainty.

Ours is a culture that rightly demands very precise explanations before action is taken. But what if an accurate foretelling of future events is not possible? This was Tony Blair’s dilemma in relation to the war on Iraq. He felt that there was a threat in the Middle East which needed to be addressed in the first instance by an assault on Saddam’s regime. But he had nothing like the precise knowledge needed to convince people thoroughly that action was justified.

Many people in the West are so convinced that Blair and Bush got it wrong in relation to Iraq that they will fail the more serious dilemma concerning Iran: we face a potentially enormous threat which, if genuine, requires fast action. But while being highly probable, it is not fully verifiable. What do we do? This is why those who see George W Bush as the Western world’s biggest problem are terribly mistaken. Bush will be gone in 3½ years. He may be replaced by a politician with a totally different outlook on world politics.

Western democracy is all about change and variation. Most of the time this is great because it prevents extremes from coming to power. But it also weakens our ability to face up to extremist regimes that do not play by the same rules. In Iran, more than 1,000 people were prevented from running as candidates in the presidential elections.

Many of these were popular reformers and women. Independent newspapers and websites are shut down. People who challenge the system are jailed. The ayatollahs claimed that about 60% of Iranians took part in last week’s elections, but there were many allegations of voter fraud and suggestions that the turnout was as low as 10%.

It takes a lot to bring about change in undemocratic regimes. There is little to stop them from becoming more and more extreme since there are no free and fair elections to check their progress, and stop the hostile ambitions of ideological leaders.

As difficult as it is to deal with Africa’s problems, our Middle Eastern dilemma has the potential to be much more intractable. It will require a mighty cultural and political effort to solve it. Even with goodwill, success cannot be guaranteed. All of which makes Bono’s message to ‘coexist’ more relevant than ever. But unfortunately it is not an answer, it’s a question. Can we?