A true friend is someone who tells you, not what you want to hear, but what you need to know. If Bertie Ahern had been a true friend to the US, he would not have said: "Yes, sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir", writes Fintan O'Toole
Along with the shamrock for St Patrick's Day, he would have presented George W. Bush with a copy of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars and urged him to have a look at the last act.
The Easter Rising of 1916 is coming towards its end. Urban warfare is being fought out on the streets of Dublin. The occupying army is moving from house to house, mopping up resistance and rounding up the men. We can hear, beyond the attic room of the slum building where the trapped civilians are huddled, that "the air in the street outside's shakin' with the firin' of rifles and machineguns".
The army, vastly superior in technology and numbers, is enraged by the terror tactics of its desperate enemies. This is, as we would call it in the new jargon of the 21st century, asymmetric warfare. A soldier has just had half his chest blown away by a sniper hiding on a roof, firing dum-dum bullets.
His sergeant, using words that would be echoed almost exactly last week, complains of this barbarism: "That's not playing the game. Why don't they come into the open and fight fair!"
Inside, a woman is mad with grief. The coffin of a child is awaiting burial.
Within the room, O'Casey has placed two ordinary Dublin citizens who are bitterly opposed to the Rising for coherent ideological reasons. One, the Covey, is an international socialist. The other, Bessie Burgess, is a Loyalist whose son is actually a member of the occupying army. Since they have no time for the rebels, a faraway military planner might even have counted on their support.
And what happens to them? The Covey is hauled off in the round-up as just another suspect Shinner. Bessie becomes collateral damage, shot dead by the jumpy soldiers, who spot her at the window and think she just might be a sniper. "Well", says the sergeant, "we couldn't afford to take any chances." An occupying army under fire from an enemy that refuses to "fight fair" does not have the luxury of discriminating between those it has come to liberate and those from whom they are to be liberated.
As a true friend, the Taoiseach could have told the Americans all of this. Whatever his own shortcomings, one thing he understands very well is the dynamic of the Northern Ireland conflict. He knows how an army that starts off with good intentions ends up kicking down doors, treating all civilians as potential terrorists and, because it can't afford to take chances, shooting innocent people. He knows how this in turn infuriates and alienates even those civilians who were not initially unsympathetic to the aims of the occupiers.
And how the result can be the almost endless disaster of an administration that is in power but not in control and a constant undertow of violence that makes a stable democracy impossible.
All of this is already happening in Iraq. We have had glimpses of British marines invading houses in Umm Qasr, their male inhabitants cuffed and pushed around by soldiers who are, reasonably enough from their own point of view, too scared for niceties. More chillingly, we have Mark Franchetti's extraordinarily vivid eyewitness report in the Sunday Times of the fighting in Nassiriya.
Franchetti describes the US marines, freaked out by their own heavy casualties, deciding that they could not afford to discriminate between Iraqi civilians and Iraqi soldiers and that they would shoot anyone that moved. He counted 12 dead civilians, including small children and women, on a bridge, shot by marines for whom all Iraqis are becoming the enemy. It is the drama of Bessie Burgess almost precisely, except that real war is even more grotesque than the most extreme drama.
This disaster is unmitigated. The suffering of the Iraqi people will become steadily worse. The Iraqi opposition's dreams of a model democracy have already dissolved and the most they can inherit is power tainted by a legacy of horrors. The disgusting regime in Baghdad is becoming, in the eyes of much of the Arab world, heroic. The lunatic fringe of Islamic terrorism is being presented with a perfect target. And the Americans have to face their own tragedy: the bright-eyed, idealistic young men who will be haunted for ever by the looks on the faces of the children they have shot.
The US has been a true friend to us in the way it has helped us to solve the Northern Ireland conflict. We owe the US in return the knowledge we have gained from that same bitter experience. We owe them the truth that the quick, clean war they wanted to fight has already been lost and the slow, brutal one they are now fighting cannot be won, even when Saddam is dead and Baghdad is occupied.