Hillsborough summit a cleverly managed public relations stunt
Curiously, there was no such warning before the 9pm news bulletin that preceded ER. That news bulletin contained scenes more bloody, more gruesome and more distressing than anything the scriptwriters of the fictional Chicago hospital drama have ever come up with.
No matter when or how this war in Iraq finally ends, among the images which many of us will remember are the pictures from a BBC cameraman shown on RTÉ's Sunday night news bulletin. The footage included pictures of the carnage caused by a "friendly fire" bombing incident in northern Iraq earlier that day. In particular, the picture of the cameraman's hand wiping blood off his camera lens as he scrambled around in the aftermath of the bombing will stick with many of us for decades.
Watching the blood-stained images, I was struck by a bizarre thought. I found myself wondering whose blood it was. I wasn't clear if it was the cameraman's own blood. Was it the blood of an English man? A Kurd? An Iraqi? An American? All four nationalities were travelling in the convoy which was blown up English journalists, their Iraqi interpreter, American troops and Kurdish militia. Many nations are caught up in this war.
The other image which will sum up this war in all our minds for a long time will be the footage shown on Monday night of Ali Ismail Abbas, the 12-year-old boy who was badly burnt and had both his arms blown off the only survivor of a blast that killed his pregnant mother and seven other relatives as they slept.
Of course, some say that these things happen in war. However, it is not good enough to dismiss the consequences of friendly fire or of cluster bombs with this phrase.
War is bloody, war is gruesome and war costs lives, including innocent lives. It is precisely because these things happen in war that many of us oppose this war.
I don't accept that the morality of this war can be determined retrospectively. Whether this war is right or wrong is not decided by who wins it. I, like many others, didn't oppose this war because I feared the US-British coalition would lose it. Our opposition to this war is not undermined just because the US-British have won it, or at least have won the conventional war phase.
I believe war is sometimes necessary. Sometimes it is necessary for the gruesome price of war to be paid in order to prevent even greater horrors. However, it is because war has such gruesome consequences that war must always be a last resort.
I also believe that the international community is sometimes required to invade a state in order to prevent oppressive regimes visiting carnage on their own population or on the population of other countries. Yet it is precisely because so many innocent people are killed in these invasions that wars against such regimes should be engaged in only with the greatest possible level of international legitimacy.
This Bush-Blair attack on Iraq is tackling a horrible evil but it could have been done in other ways. All the other options were not explored and the Bush administration in particular has shown a deep disregard for the wishes of the international community.
The other image that will stick with me from this week is the coverage of the summit in Hillsborough on Monday and Tuesday. No amount of peace process window dressing could hide the fact that the Blair-Bush meeting in Northern Ireland was a war summit. Of the 20 or so hours that George Bush spent in the region Northern Ireland, on Monday and Tuesday he and Tony Blair spent all but two of their waking hours discussing the war in Iraq and discussing the mop-up operation required there along with the process of physical and political reconstruction that will now have to be put in place in that country.
They may also have spent some time discussing the "roadmap" for the Middle East peace process, but they couldn't have spent too long on it. The Middle East "roadmap" is supposed to be largely complete. It is now overdue and, in any case, it is not an exclusively US-British plan; the European Union and Russia were also
involved in writing it.
This week's Bush-Blair summit meeting could have been held anywhere. The venue they chose was insensitive and self-serving. I struggle not to be cynical but the Bush-Blair Hillsborough summit screamed: "Dare you call us warmongers with the Irish peace process in our arms." It was a skilfully managed international public relations stunt, worthy of a spin master of the calibre of Blair's director of communications, Alastair Campbell. It was a well-staged and tightly scripted bilateral presentation in which the Republic of Ireland was given a walk-on part.
Today, in Belfast, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern will roll out the detail of the "completion phase" of the Northern Ireland peace process. Most, if not all, of the work on the Blair-Ahern "completion plan" was finalised long before the idea of George Bush coming to Belfast even emerged. I can't help but think that many Irish people, north and south, will have a sense that last Monday and Tuesday the Northern Irish peace process was exploited in the most cynical way by a British Prime Minster who needed to reassert his peacemaking persona and by an American President whose personal contribution to Northern Ireland has been minimal. We can only hope that, notwithstanding this exploitation, the impact on the Northern Ireland peace process of this Blair-Bush summit has been, at best, neutral.
The exercise of Irish foreign policy has been diminished rather than enhanced during the Iraqi war. We would like to be able to hope that in the debate about post-war Iraq, Ireland could redeem its reputation among the less powerful nations of the world for evenhandedness and independence in foreign policy. The problem is that a dramatic shift occurred in Irish foreign policy in the Dáil debate three weeks ago when the decision was made to continue to provide facilities at Shannon to the US military. This week the High Court has been hearing interesting evidence which suggests considerable weaknesses of some of the precedents on which that decision was said by the Government to have been based.
Our decision about Shannon three weeks ago allowed Ireland to be depicted as part of the so-called coalition of the willing, whether we wanted to or not.
The fact that our Government was mute when it should have been critical of Bush and Blair for going to war without a second United Nations resolution has diminished our credibility when we now advocate that the UN should play the leading role in post-war Iraq.
Emboldened by their swift Iraqi victory, and perhaps they will be re-elected on the back of it, the hawkish clique of the Republican Party, which is in power in the United States, will find another Middle Eastern enemy to fight. Next time, they will move without their New Labour allies if they have to. Again, the consequences will be bloody and gruesome.
Unfortunately, having been so quiet on this occasion, it will be harder for Ireland to find its voice against them when they do it again.
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