For those who support a US war against Iraq, the issue is very simple, the argument immune to destruction, argues Kevin Myers. Not being such a person, I don't understand it at all. For all else aside, in the event of a dead heat between the arguments for and against, logic and morality must dictate: no war.
Unlike most Irish people, I like President Bush, I admire Dick Cheney, and I think Donald Rumsfeld is perfectly enchanting. Compared to the suet of Irish political waffle, with all its inarticulate evasions and its politically correct clichés, the language of the US administration is as invigorating as a north wind. Though President Bush lacks cogency, he more than compensates with his steadfastness, his personal modesty and his outstanding ability to appoint clever people. What you hear from the Bush administration is plain speaking, stripped of all babble and flam, and it's wonderful.
And it sounds as if they're plain-speaking their way into war. They understand why, and I simply don't. Our language and logic don't match, though outwardly they should. A street map of New York uses much the same lines and symbols as one of Paris, but it won't help you get round it.
So I hear the logic that Dick Cheney uses to justify war against Iraq, and I understand the terms and the terminology. But the argument that he finds compelling just leaves me baffled, with my finger on the map, gazing around stupidly at the buildings which shouldn't be there, looking for ones that should.
Gratitude and friendship
Let's be clear about one thing: without the US, Europe would have been plucked and raped by either of the continent's two malignant inventions of the past century, Communism or Nazism. So my unease at what the Bush administration is up to is not driven by enmity for the US, but by gratitude and friendship.
Of course, it wasn't my country which was attacked on September 11th, when the toxins of war were injected into the US body politic; and those who haven't had those toxins coursing through their system are usually immune to the logic, the emotions, the justifications of those who have. For war justifies the unjustifiable, and hardens the most delicate to naked savagery. That's why war should always be a political instrument of last resort.
No sense of closure
The US didn't start the war that began a year ago next Wednesday week; and in a way it can't finish it, because the enemy has no boundaries to cross, or armies to vanquish, or capital to capture. So there can be no clear conclusion to the war, no proper sense of closure. Even Afghanistan didn't provide that.
To be sure, and despite too many tragic exceptions, the war there was conducted brilliantly and humanely: we may disregard the innumerate hysteria of those fools or knaves who declared that the US was deliberately butchering thousands of innocents. But victory in Afghanistan was not enough, for Afghanistan was a victim too. The enemy's heartland still lies unconquered.
It's as if, with its war fevers still engaged, and with Al-Qaeda routed but not extinct, and unlikely ever to be, the US is still looking for a legitimate target to exercise its full and righteous anger against. US rage could properly be directed at Saudi Arabia, the fons et origo of Islamic fascism, but that isn't possible in the shorter term; so in the meantime, Iraq must fit the bill.
And why not? It's an utter tyranny which is working on weapons of mass destruction, which has murdered many thousands of citizens, and levied terrible, bloody war upon its neighbours. Yet the US hasn't shown us any convincing evidence that those "weapons of mass destruction" are much more than demonic fantasies. Instead, one senses that Iraq is simply in the general line of US fire; and that's not a good enough reason for war.
Admittedly, the pious bleats from Europe's mongrel lambs against war almost convince me that whatever they say, the opposite must be better: for these noises are emanating from the lazy, fat continent which chooses not to defend itself, even as it sermonises sanctimoniously to its defenders. But even being in such disagreeable company can't persuade me that war is the right option.
September 11th created a global version of an old kind of local war. It was the war of the flea, writ large, for guerrilla war thrives on the over-reaction of the guerrilla's enemy. September 11th couldn't have defeated the US; the intention was to provoke it past endurance, so that in its rage it would make an enemy of much of the world. The first blow was sufficient. All the appalling energies that it generated within the victim were intended to sustain the war thereafter. The enemy's strength becomes your strength.
Self-fulfilling assertion
So fresh wars, fresh pretexts for wars, might duly be found by the victim of the attack; and the wholly false pretext that justified the Twin Towers attack would thus become a self-fulfilling assertion, as the US faithfully did Osama bin Laden's bidding, and became, in the eyes of the Muslim world, the Great Satan.
No one will accompany the US in any attack on Iraq - not even, I suspect, the UK. But then nobody else was injected with the toxins of war. Those are the toxins now apparently taking command of US policy. If those toxins are successful, they could in due course inflame and destabilise the entire Muslim world; and that of course was Bin Laden's ambition all along.