Bertie, there are no good guys in any war

Let's ease up on Joe Jacob. The ability to give the nation a good laugh is no mean feat. God knows, laughter has been in short supply since September 11th. Not in as short supply as the iodine tablets with which both he and Marian Finucane seemed obsessed, but rare nonetheless.

The fact is, prepared or unprepared, a terrorist nuclear attack would have appalling consequences. The children of Chernobyl should have taught us that. A well-planned, co-ordinated and prompt response might obviate some of the consequences, but short of each of us building our own well-stocked and air-filtered shelter, the outlook is grim.

The world may have changed for ever when the terrorists targeted America, but it changed even more drastically with the deployment of nuclear weapons. In the second World War, the bad guys deprived millions of their democratic rights and millions more of their lives. But the good guys obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And no, I am not suggesting moral equivalence between the two sides, or that military action is never justified. It is just to make the obvious point that warfare is a dirty, deadly business. While there never were any lily-white good guys in any war, the potential for destruction which could be unleashed by any major war now threatens the very survival of the planet.

When the consequences of wide-scale war are so frightful, one would think that massive resources would be pumped into learning new ways to resolve conflict, instead of into new and more efficient ways to kill.

Being a neutral country has no moral force unless that neutrality is used actively to promote peace and alternatives to armed conflict. When Bertie Ahern, without the consent of the Irish people, offered the use of Irish airspace and airports, he gave moral backing to whatever course of action the US decides to take, with no power to influence what that decision might be. No doubt like the rest of us he devoutly hopes that sanity will prevail and that whatever ensues will be limited and just.

He has no guarantee that that will happen. Yet he still made the gesture. And he cannot claim a UN mandate. The Security Council, in its September 12th resolution, found the attacks to be a "threat to international peace and security". But it did not authorise or require any use of force - it only expressed its "readiness to take all necessary steps". Thus, it clearly was not an action resolution.

Of course, Ahern's gesture was largely symbolic, but symbolism is important. What will he do if US action involves the loss of thousands more innocent lives? It was particularly inappropriate to make such a gesture as we move into our new role as chair of the UN Security Council. To be genuinely neutral rather than a pit-stop for fighter planes would enormously enhance our status in that role.

While at the moment much of the Arab world is cautiously supportive of Bush's war against terrorism, that could change very rapidly. If it does, the consequences may be too terrible to contemplate. We are a small nation, but small nations can have profound impact, as Norway has had in its attempts to facilitate peace. In a different way, the Irish Army has had an honourable record of peace-keeping, marked this week by the official withdrawal from Lebanon, where 45 Irish people lost their lives.

The offer made by Ahern was wrong, but not because it may draw us into a conflict not of our making and make us targets. In the kind of warfare that is waged today, no one is safe. Irish citizens lost their lives on the 11th September simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Given that modern warfare has repercussions way beyond national borders, we should be using our neutrality to support minimal use of force. Such anti-war arguments intensely annoy many people, who ask what would have happened if, say, no one was prepared to take a military stand against Hitler and his allies. While it is true that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it, those who do not recognise the change in our times are also doomed to make terrible mistakes.

Osama bin Laden is not Hitler. Bin Laden and the others who are not household names operate as though national boundaries do not exist, and they have access to means of destruction unimaginable 50 years ago. An ancient crop-dusting plane can become a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of someone unafraid to die. Conventional warfare is useless against terrorism.

If our own recent history has taught us anything, it should be that terrorism may be temporarily stalemated but not defeated, and that it is impossible to defeat while unjust conditions prevail. Conflict resolution requires patience on a monumental scale, as entrenched antagonisms appear to triumph again and again over progress.

This is not a palatable truth in an America new to terrorist activity on this scale, and still hopeful that some sort of surgical strike will solve the problem. It would be a genuine act of friendship to speak that unpalatable truth.

Instead, this offer of access to Irish airports is part of a long secession from commitment to neutrality. Bertie Ahern promised a referendum on Partnership for Peace and did not deliver. Now he is offering unconditional endorsement to whatever the US chooses to do, again without consultation of the electorate.

Most of the parliamentary parties seem to regard our neutrality as some kind of embarrassment, instead of a positive endorsement of values other than violence. It is not an irrelevance in a post-Cold War world. Given the nature of modern warfare, active neutrality was never more needed. Gandhi once said that the goal was not to bring the enemy to his knees but to his senses. This does not mean passivity in the face of evil, but painful difficult engagement with the causes of evil. It may even demand military action such as in the peace-keeping missions of the Irish Army. But once we move beyond that, we become part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. That is why Bertie Ahern's choice of symbolic gesture of solidarity was so wrong.

bobrien@irish-times.ie