People with no sense of history or its lessons are casting aside practices that gave us 50 years of comparative peace, writes John Bruton
The world crisis over Iraq has seen an almost total breakdown in trust within the European Union. The leaders of four of the biggest states - Britain, France, Germany and Spain - have shown that, as far as the Iraq issue is concerned, they will sacrifice nothing for Europe, do not trust one another, and will ignore mutual interests completely.
The guidelines, precedents and practices that gave us over half a century of comparative peace are now being cast aside by people who have no sense of history or of its lessons. Tony Blair and George Bush are preparing to tear up the United Nations Charter.
The realistic, amoral, but coldly effective doctrine of deterrence is now being recklessly abandoned by the US and Britain in favour of a subjective, self-serving, and untried doctrine of pre-emptive or preventive wars. Iraq is only the first potential target in the wars that this noxious doctrine is likely to unleash.
The principal European war leaders - Blair and Aznar - propose to put themselves in flagrant breach of their solemn EU treaty obligations, and also of international law.
They are breaching the solemn obligations in Article 11 of the Treaty of the European Union of 1992, which obliges all EU members: "to define and implement a common (European) security policy with its fellow EU members ... in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter".
Not the slightest effort has been made by Tony Blair, José María Aznar, Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schröder to either "define" or to "implement" such a common security policy for Europe on Iraq.
The four leaders also have a solemn EU treaty obligation "to work together" on this sort of issue. In fact, they are working against one another, and in the case of Blair and Aznar, they are working to an agenda that has been set outside Europe, with no regard whatever to Europe's opinions or interests.
If Blair and Aznar support a US attack on Iraq without a United Nations resolution explicitly authorising it, they will then be in straightforward breach of the United Nations Charter. In particular, they will breach Articles 2 and 39 of this charter.
Article 2 requires all states to refrain from the "threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political integrity of any state". This very article, used to justify the 1991 Gulf War, is now to be flouted by Britain and America.
Article 39 says that the United Nations Security Council - not any individual state or coalition of states - "shall define the existence of any threat to peace". Britain and the US say they are ready to ignore this article of the charter and make that decision on their own.
The Irish Supreme Court is likely to take careful note of the words of these articles of the UN Charter if the Government attempts to give airport facilities at Shannon to a military campaign carried out in defiance of the charter.
Hans Blix's most recent report provides no basis for the precipitate military action now being planned.
Blix said last week that Iraq was already giving "active" or even "pro-active" co-operation.
He added that "even with a pro-active Iraqi attitude, induced by continuous outside pressure, it would still take some time to verify sites and items, analyse documents, interview relevant persons and draw conclusions". Yet Blair, Aznar and Bush demand that this should all be done by next Monday, March 17th. Such a demand is designed to be impossible to meet. Prophecies of war become self-fulfilling.
The writer Karl Kraus once asked, "How do wars start?" He answered, "Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read."
Statesmen now consider war with Iraq to be inevitable because they are reading the results of their own briefings in the papers, telling them it is inevitable.
After he has done this deed, Tony Blair, like Macbeth, will find himself anxiously looking around for new spectres, new threats, new portents.
No one doubts that, in conventional military terms, the US can overwhelm Iraq, just as it overwhelmed Grenada, Panama and Serbia. But what happens after that? Will occupying US troops find the weapons the UN inspectors could not find? What if they fail? Into whose hands will the weapons then fall, if there are any? How many new recruits will al-Qaeda get? Will American public opinion accept a long-term US military occupation of an Arab country?
Blair and Bush like to evoke the memory of Winston Churchill. They might remember Churchill's words, "Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace."
And as they proceed to ignore public opinion, to ignore the Pope, to ignore the United Nations Charter, and as they are cheered on by their "neo-realist" media supporters in Ireland, they should remember what Napoleon said at the height of his powers in 1808: "In war, moral considerations account for three-quarters, the balance of actual forces for only the other quarter."
This war, to be begun with such certainty, will end in grievous doubts and guilty reflections. Blair, once Europe's great hope, is, in the moral sense, about to do a totally bad thing.
I believe the American military occupation of Iraq will prove to be so costly that in about two years' time, it will lead to a retreat by the US into the sort of narrow national interest-based approach to international relations that characterised its policy in the 1930s. America is already heavily in deficit and in debt, and it is likely to see the purchasing power of its currency fall further over the next two years as the full costs of military occupation sink in.
The resultant American isolationism will mean that a European common foreign and defence policy, far from being a luxury, will then become an overwhelming necessity. Europe will be forced to come together to shoulder the responsibilities which it has sub-contracted to America for so long.
John Bruton is former taoiseach and former leader of Fine Gael