War really does ask impossible questions to which there are no comfortable answers, argues Kevin Myers. Who can contemplate the figure of little armless Ali in his bed, with 40 per cent of his body burnt, and his entire family wiped out, and then say "Yes" to the question, Was this worth it?
One might wriggle away from the moral dilemma posed there by saying that it is not the right question, that there is no equivalence between his personal tragedy and the tragedy of Iraq, that one is not necessarily contingent on the other, that accidents happen in war, and there was no intent to do that to him, and so on.
But it doesn't enable us to escape this central truth. Without the allied bombing of Iraq, he would be an intact little boy, facing adolescence and manhood with a whole body and an entire family. Can the catastrophe that his life has now become be justified? Language as we use it, and the moral norms we take for granted, cannot permit a straightforward affirmative. How can anyone say Yes, the liberation of Iraq was worth the mutilation of this boy and the destruction of his entire family?
We might ask another question: which is worse - the destruction of the National Museum of Iraq by looters, with the possible loss of tens of thousands of archaeological artefacts central to our understanding of world history, or the mutilation and orphaning of little Ali? Such questions have no easy answer, to be sure: they make us make us uncomfortable because they challenge the conventions which make civilised, morally untortured life possible. These are the conventions which prevent us asking inconvenient questions about our lives.
Take the most obvious moral dilemma society has steadfastly refused to discuss: deaths on the roads. We have effectively written into our social contract that we are prepared to tolerate several hundred road deaths a year rather than forfeit the benefits of the private car. Moreover, having done this in a largely unspoken compact, we then decline to discuss the issue of what is an acceptable level of road homicide.
So we can all say X many deaths are too many. But who is prepared to say that the number Y is tolerable? And who is then prepared to go to the spouse, the child, the parent of a victim and say, Your loss is socially acceptable: it's the price of freedom.
We don't put it like that, because we daren't. Such logic is morally outrageous. But so, too often, is the truth. It is an actuarial certainty that our freedom to drive will cost human lives; and no government could survive any attempt to confiscate that freedom. So we accept that hundreds of people will die, and many others will be paralysed and mutilated, in order for the rest of us to drive.
We are quite a ruthless species, actually: but we like to think of ourselves as belonging to the benign Not In My Name species, homo nimnini-pimini. In fact, H. nimnini-pimini is not at all benign, but a humbug: it classically asks hard questions of the conduct of others, but not of itself.
Go back to the boy Ali. Is his suffering worth it? Ask another question. Go back to the thousands of Alis of Europe in 1945: was the freedom of the world worth the price they paid? You can't say a simple "Yes" to those questions without asking terrible questions of yourself, ones which no member of the species H. nimnini-pimini can possibly do.
In fact we seem to be socially programmed not to interrogate ourselves and our priorities. Ask any of the sickly shades of green of Irish political life whether Ali's sacrifice was worth it, and you will get a NIMNishly emphatic "No!" Ask them then about the 28 Dublin children killed during the 1916 Rising, and the answer will be long, complex and in Sumerian.
It's only partly relevant that Saddam himself never scrupled about making fresh Alis: we still must answer for our own Alis. And that we are recognisably the same species as Saddam is shown by our ruthless refusal to confront the moral dilemmas which result not just from violence, but also upon our insistence in living in a particular way. Do we not trade with anyone, no matter how evil, in order to make ourselves richer? Remember: we sold Saddam beef to feed his army, long after he had gassed thousands of Kurds. How could we justify our passive complicity in this intentional monstrosity, with fresh monstrosities to come? Simple. We didn't. We all of us - Government, Opposition, press - turned a blind eye, because we wanted to do long-term business with Iraq rather than ask ourselves uncomfortable questions that could result in even more uncomfortable answers.
And there was good reason to turn a blind eye. We didn't have the luxury of plenty in those days. The economy was in ruins, emigration was rampant. Many GAA clubs were unable to field a single team because all the young men had gone. Entire communities faced collapse. Could we seriously have indulged our emotions and our scruples over an issue we knew little of and cared even less about, and thereby lose thousands of jobs? We all of us are haunted by Ali. But his appalling fate tells less about the nature of war than it does about our inability to face up to truths about ourselves. Our museums, like that in Baghdad, are full of the artefacts of civilisation; but our Alis, down all the generations, go publicly unremembered.