How does joining PFP sit with Irish neutrality?

The week before last, on Questions and Answers, Mary O'Rourke told the nation that the Government wanted to initiate a debate on whether Ireland should join the Partnership for Peace, a kind of second division of NATO. Last week, the Taoiseach announced that Ireland would be joining the PFP by the end of the year. The grand national debate had been conducted in the absence of the nation. Or perhaps, like de Valera before him, he had merely to look into his own heart to know what the Irish people were thinking.

To understand what is going on here, it is necessary to cast our minds back 10 years. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a great triumph for humanity. But it was also a great disaster for the military-industrial complexes of the US and western Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact after 1989, the western military establishment was facing the worst fate that can possibly befall an army. It had run out of enemies.

The huge and immensely expensive infrastructure of arms manufacturers, defence contractors, missile silos, military analysts, armies, navies and air forces had depended for its existence on the supposed threat of a Soviet invasion. The stark evidence that the post-communist Russians couldn't defeat the Chechens, never mind invade western Europe, was, for those in the war business, a potential disaster.

But they rallied their forces, and looked for new ways to justify the expenditure of trillions of dollars a year on "defence". In the US, for example, the Pentagon, in 1994, leaked to sympathetic journalists the results of a simulated war against China in 2020. Remarkably, the Yellow Peril, now equipped with space-based sensors and satellite-controlled missiles, sank the fleets of the Free World and proceeded to subdue the West. The rueful implication was that, sadly, trillions more dollars would have to be spent on new weapons systems to counter the inscrutable Chinese, incidentally keeping the defence industries in clover.

Less fanciful but probably more effective was the direct appeal to politicians. When, for in stance, the US Congress seemed close to abandoning the expensive F-16 fighter programme, rendered redundant by the end of the Cold War, the plane's manufacturers, General Dynamics, distributed a map to every member of Congress. It showed, in dollars, the economic impact of the F16 programme on every state and congressional district. The arms industry, of course, is America's version of state investment in local economies. Few local politicians could face the consequences of having those subsidies withdrawn.

Most effective of all, however, because it was partly based on reality, was the notion that the West would have to police a world full of regional and ethnic conflicts and menaced by rogue dictators. NATO, instead of folding up, could be reinvented. The nasty old war machine could be refurbished as a nice new peace machine. And so, at the NATO summit in Brussels in 1994, the Partnership for Peace was unveiled. Now there is nothing wrong with peacekeeping, or even, in extreme cases, with peace enforcing. The horrible lessons of the post-Cold War world are that people have to be protected against their neighbours and their own governments. We've known this all along. Ireland has a splendid record of accepting its responsibilities to the rest of the world, and dozens of families have borne the burden of grief as a result. The question, though, is not about the necessity for military intervention to keep or establish peace. It's about who decides and directs such interventions and to what ends. It would be nice to think that the decision to intervene is driven by a concern for human rights and democracy. But it isn't. Why did the US and its allies decide to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait but not to drive the Indonesians out of East Timor? Why is the murderous Saddam Hussein high on their hit list while Slobodan Milosevic is treated as a necessary evil? Why did the international community do nothing about the hideous genocide in Rwanda?

Because actions are taken on the basis of what the US and the western powers perceive to be their national interests. Sometimes, those national interests coincide with the general interests of humanity. Sometimes they don't. The only mechanism for deciding which is which is the deeply flawed but urgently necessary United Nations.

Essentially what the Government has decided to do is to shift the focus of Ireland's peacekeeping efforts from the UN to NATO in its Orwellian guise as the PFP. Lest there be any doubt that we are about to place ourselves effectively under NATO's political umbrella, it is worth remembering what the White Paper on Foreign Affairs, published by Dick Spring in 1996, had to say on the subject.

The White Paper contained the first formal suggestion that Ireland should join PFP. It goes out of its way to minimise the significance of such a step. But it acknowledges the PFP cannot be divorced from NATO: "the PFP is not a standalone organisation".

It spells out the process by which Ireland will, if the Government has its way, join the PFP: "After signature of the Framework Document a subscribing state provides NATO with a Presentation Document setting out its approach to PFP and identifying the areas in which it is interested. On the basis of this, the subscribing state enters discussions with NATO on an agreed work programme tailored to the country's needs, interests and capabilities. This may include training programmes and exercises in the areas of interest to the country concerned."

In other words, Ireland's selfless record of peacekeeping over four decades is to be prostituted to the urgent need of the old cold warriors to find a new excuse for wasting money on their arms industries. Never mind that we know more about peacekeeping than most of them. Never mind the Garda Siochana's superb record in helping to establish unarmed police forces in areas recovering from conflict. We now must agree our "work programme" with NATO and be trained in peacekeeping methods by an organisation dominated by the world's leading arms exporters.

No one has told us why this must happen. No one has explained why we should stop taking our lead from the UN and start taking it from NATO. The apparent explanation is that the UN is anxious to devolve its peacekeeping operations to regional bodies. This is true. But the appropriate regional body in Europe is the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Even the White Paper recognises this: "Ireland's policy will be to strengthen the OSCE . . . and to further develop the organisation's capacity for preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping."

How do you develop the OSCE's capacity for peacekeeping by replacing it with a cosmetically enhanced version of an obsolete Cold War alliance? How does an "agreed work programme" with NATO sit with Irish neutrality? Or maybe such questions were answered in the silent national debate that raged in Bertie Ahern's heart last week.