Let’s stay well away from occupied Iraq
To go in under the overall military and political control of the US/UK coalition would be to serve their agenda.
Our men and women would be seen by many Iraqis and most of Islam as doing exactly that no more and no less.
There were many good reasons for changing the regime in Iraq. Saddam's previous crimes, his WMD programmes, the possibility of his attacking his own people, his neighbours or the West (whether in 45 minutes, 45 hours, 45 days ).
But these were not the main reasons for the war; neither do they explain the current US/UK presence. The war was simply a matter of economics. The US and the UK are oil-producing countries which are increasingly unable to supply their needs from their own dwindling oil reserves. This is not woolly leftish rhetoric.
The occupation of Iraq is a fait accompli. Like all the adults in Hans Christian Andersen's story about the Emperor's Clothes, we gain nothing from pretending that the occupation is short-term and has nothing to do with oil.
It is about securing oil supplies for the foreseeable future and that means 'securing' the Middle East. Whatever one might think about the morality or on-the-ground effectiveness of their policies, at least the so-called 'neo-cons' are living in something approximating to the real world.
Though the recent power 'outages' in the US and London had nothing to do with Iraq or terrorism, they remind us of just how much our economy and our way of life depends on energy.
How do we share the resources of our planet? Facing the reality of the occupation is not to say that the world community (and we in Ireland ) have no role to play. Quite the contrary.
However, we on this island, of all the people in the world, should understand the complexities of the situation. Indeed the mishandling of the post-invasion situation may have made it too late to reach a bloodless solution in Iraq.
Ideally, the US/UK coalition should hand over transitional Iraq (and its oil) to the UN assuming that the UN has both the will and the political and physical capacity to take over.
Is this likely to happen quickly, if at all, under the current US/UK administrations? A new Security Council resolution will probably emerge from the UN, but its wording and its mandate could merely exacerbate the crisis.
A kneejerk decision by the Government to commit resources and our name as a nation to an occupation of Iraq which effectively only serves the US/UK agenda cannot be supported.
Anybody who knows anything about the history of our own island in the 20th century must understand only too clearly how easy it is to bring about the alienation of a population from 'occupying forces,' however well-intentioned those forces may be.
We must not be drawn into what will not be somebody else's new Vietnam but ours. I can speak only for myself but there must be some few others here who will do everything they can to prevent such a terrible mistake.
Maurice O'Connell,
19, Forge Park,
Oakpark,
Tralee,
Co Kerry
