Hillah. Let those who opposed the US-led liberation of Iraq remember the name. Hillah, the Final Solution of Iraq. Remember the name,you appeasers.
The war for Iraqi freedom occasioned much posturing fatuity in this country, a great deal from readers of this newspaper. The most perfect letter came from Senator David Norris, which ran: "in the light of the claim that to take a moral position on Shannon might cost the Irish people in terms of American investment and jobs at Shannon, could I ask Mr Bertie Ahern, and those who think like him, the following question: How many dead Iraqi children equals one job?"
A good question. The answer: about 10. The IDA negotiated a deal with the USAF: the more children the Americans killed, the more jobs Ireland would get, provided we kept Shannon open. The US wanted one job for every 15 children they killed. The IDA said one job for every five children. So we split the difference: 10.
Hmm. Do you recognise a certain rather heavy literary device here? It's called irony, and it's heavy because subtlety of any kind is quite impossible when confronted with a question of such industrial-scale asininity as that posed by David Norris. That it could emanate from any elected politician is depressing: that it came from a Senator for Trinity College Dublin passes all belief, and certainly confounds my limited vocabulary.
The war was terrible. It was W-A-R. It was meant to be terrible. All wars are. But after the Belsen-discoveries of Hillah, who can argue that it was wrong? And moreover, who can seriously argue that it was better for the old regime to have remained than to have it ejected by violence? Children died in the war, but not one thousandth of the number of children who had perished of malnutrition and gas-poisoning under the Saddam regime.
In one of the richest countries in the world, one third of the population are now close to starvation. The final straw came just before the war, when Saddam ordered the Bank of Iraq to issue his son Uday with $1 billion in notes, which were packed onto a couple of trucks and then vanished.
One billion dollars. And if David Norris has written a letter to this newspaper asking how many starving Iraqi children could have been fed with that sum, I missed it. The theft was the family's parting gift to the Iraqi people, who have been butchered by the tens of thousand by inward oppression, and by the hundreds of thousand in needless wars against neighbours who suffered comparable losses.
This didn't stop the imbecilic protesters at Shannon, who in essence were declaring that they preferred to indulge their emotions, their perverse world-view and their loathing of America, rather than alleviate the unendurable burdens of the people of Iraq. So the true arithmetic of the dilemma of war was not how many dead Iraqi children were worth a job in Shannon (10, as we know), but how many Iraqi children must die because of Saddam's regime before, finally, the protesters would allow Shannon to be used. Premature deaths among children in Iraq over the past 10 years have probably exceeded a quarter of a million; all because of the artificial conditions created by Saddam, though blamed - naturally - by the West-haters on the US. So at what point do the Shannonistas allow intervention? Half-a-million child-deaths? Two million?
The war wasn't fought to save children, the NIMNs - the Not In My Names - will declare. Bloody right it wasn't: and, pace Davis Norris's fatuous letter, it wasn't fought to kill them either. It was fought to get this evil madman's hands off the levers of state power, and as a direct consequence, thousands of children will live; but no thanks to the Shannonistas and the NIMNs.
To be sure, not many Iraqis cheered liberation. A quarter of a century of horrendous oppression makes people cautious of "liberation" by foreigners, not least because they might go away while the flag's rather embarrassingly still waving in your hand: then what next? And who seriously expects Arabs to cheer white Christian soldiers arriving in the greatest Arab city of them all? But cut it how you like: freedom has triumphed in Iraq, and tyranny was overthrown. Which doesn't mean history ends now; the three vilayets of the old Ottoman Empire which form the present Baghdad have always made uneasy partners within the one state and presumably will remain so.
And of course mistakes were made and will continue to be made. The laxity which permitted the looting of Iraq's national museum was both catastrophic and scandalous, especially since the oil ministry was guarded; but that was ineptitude, not cynicism. For not merely were looters also able to destroy the absolutely vital interior and foreign ministry buildings, Western journalists were able to seize vast amounts of precious documents.
Just ask George Galloway, that great hero of the British anti-war movement before the war.
I await in vain the shoals of letters to this newspaper saying,"We were wrong" - words quite unknown to the Shannonista-NIMNish strand of Irish life.
Yet what would Ireland's standing in the US be today if the NIMNs, the left and the Enda hope for Fine Gael had won the argument, and Shannon had been closed to the US? And what, dear Christ, have you all to say about Hillah?