War protesters cranking up the tempo as Rumsfeld horses around

By Ryle Dwyer

"Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders," Powell reportedly replied.

"The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return."

The story is actually an urban legend, but it sounded so good that it has been published in the United States as if it were true. It appears on more than a hundred websites.

My initial reaction on reading it was a combination of incredulity and outrage. I found it incredible, because Americans have retained land in the form of bases in many part of the world.

The Americans seized the area where the Panama Canal was built and only gave it back in 1999, having held it for its most valuable years.

If one were to compare American eagerness to get into this current war with any other conflict, it would be the Spanish-American war of little over a century ago.

The Americans got their base in Guantanamo, Cuba, out of that conflict, and that is where they are keeping their prisoners of war from Afghanistan, because Bush and company can get away with making their own laws on that base, where the writ of the US Constitution does not extend for some reason best known to them alone.

Of course, if one was to go back in history, the bulk of America's wars were fought over centuries against the Indian nations, and they didn't just take bases from them. They seized the bulk of the continental United States.

Yet my outrage was not prompted so much by the perversion of history as the contemptible way that some people would exploit the sacrifices of those who were killed in the other wars.

My father was killed in action in Germany while serving in the US Army in 1945 and he was buried in Luxembourg.

"When it's over," he wrote from the front in France in October 1944, "we can say we did our part and made our sacrifice for what we hold dear."

Only those people themselves had the right to say what each of them was fighting for, but people can judge for themselves whether the ultimate outcome was beneficial for the remainder of humanity.

A British Commonwealth cemetery at Etaples in the Pais-de-Calais, where 11,000 soldiers were buried, was vandalised with anti-British graffiti this week.

"Dig up your rubbish, it's contaminating our soil," one message read. If that happened in an American cemetery, there would not be one bottle of French wine or perfume left on the shelves of the USA.

President Jacques Chirac formally apologised to Queen Elizabeth. Even though things have been pretty cool lately between him and Prime Minister Tony Blair, the latter graciously acknowledged the apology.

No doubt he knows that British yobs are capable of similar conduct. But we can't afford to be smug either, when one thinks of the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen in 1987.

All the people protesting against the Iraqi War are not cranks, but they do include just about all the cranks. Joe Higgins and his mobile mob have every right to protest, but not to behave like they did on Wednesday.

The number of people killed in the war in Iraq so far is only a fraction of the number of deaths for which Saddam had been responsible.

Did Joe, or any of his mob, ever protest about any of those deaths? When they decided to force the gardaí to remove them, they should have been prosecuted both for causing an obstruction and for wasting garda time.

We have a right to expect that the gardaí should use minimum force in arresting people, but at the same time they should not have to put up with the kind of foul-mouthed abuse to which they were subjected outside the Dáil.

People were justifiably incensed at the behaviour of some gardaí during the Mayday protest, but if no sanctions are enforced against those who unfairly abuse them, this will inevitably lead to the frustrated gardaí taking things into their own hands again.

As it stands Joe Higgins got a free ride and enormous publicity. Ignoring such behaviour invites other costly publicity stunts and will lead to the further infringement of other people's rights.

While the conventional war could be over in Iraq within a matter of days, there is a danger that it could be followed by an urban guerrilla war on the lines the one the IRA waged against the British.

Much will depend on the form of the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. There are already growing signs of strains between London and Washington.

Tony Blair implicitly condemned the Pentagon's language in relation to the running of Iraq, as well as its attitude towards Syria and Iran. British diplomats are worried about the harsh language being used by Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary of Defence.

In response to questions this week, Tony Blair told the House of Commons that "Iraq should not be run either by the coalition or by the UN it should be run by Iraqis."

There has been a certain rapport between Blair and Colin Powell, but even they are singing from different hymn sheets on this issue. At a meeting with EU foreign ministers on Thursday, Powell declared that "the coalition has to play the lead role in determining the way forward" in Iraq.

Is this the Bush Administration's idea of freedom and democracy for Iraq? The differences between Blair and Powell are small compared to the gulf between Powell and Rumsfeld. In the past week Rumsfeld warned Syria against helping the Saddam regime.

In 1983, during the Iran-Iraq War, Rumsfeld acted as a personal emissary for President Ronald Reagan in bringing direct aide to Saddam, who started that war. The Americans had no qualms about supporting his international aggression then.

Rumsfeld is a typical bully who behaves one way and demands that everyone else behave differently.

The way that Rumsfeld and some of his sidekicks have been running off at the mouth is reminiscent of Gen Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.

Who will they wish to attack next Iran, North Korea or Syria? During the Korean War MacArthur wanted to bomb and blockade China. All of America's allies were opposed to this, but MacArthur had only contempt for the views of anybody who disagreed with him.

For instance, he publicly denounced as a "dangerous concept", the idea "that members of our armed forces owe primary allegiance or loyalty to those who temporarily exercise the authority of the executive branch of the government".

President Harry Truman had to fire him. At the time Truman recalled that while Abraham Lincoln was having trouble with one of his generals, he told the story of the man whose horse was acting up and stuck his hoof in one of the stirrups. "If you're going to get on," the rider said to the horse, "I'm going to get off."

Bush is no Truman, so who is going to tell Rumsfeld where to get off?