How is it, asks Vincent Browne, that the humanitarian crusaders of our day, the Americans and the British, who have waged war on Iraq for the humanitarian objective of liberating the people of Iraq, don't seem a little bit bothered about humanitarian causes elsewhere in the world?
The disarmament alibi for the war on Iraq is now irrelevant, apparently. Iraq either had no weapons of mass destruction or, if it had, was not prepared to use them, even in the most dire of circumstances That is the same as having no weapons of mass destruction.
So the war has got to have been about humanitarianism. Touching. Even if it involved the slaughter of thousands of Iraqis, the devastation of its society and infrastructure, mass starvation and lawlessness. Even if the majority of Iraqis did not want to be liberated by the Americans. Even if it destabilises what passes for a world order, terrifies people around the globe - the Syrians in the first instance - and breeds a new and more cynical colonialism.
What are the people of, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to make of this? Far more people have lost their lives in the Congo in the last decade because of war than ever lost their lives because of Saddam Hussein - in the Great Lakes region of Africa probably more than four million have died because of the genocide in Rwanda, the ongoing genocide in Burundi (more than 400 people were massacred there last week), the international wars in the Congo and the civil and ethnic wars in the Congo. In the last 10 days, more than 1,500 people were killed in the north east of the Congo in Ituri.
What has this got to do with the Americans and the British? A lot.
The Congo was pillaged by a dictator far more rapacious and brutal than was Saddam Hussein. He was Sese Seko Mobutu, who from 1965 to 1997 ran a regime that was known as a "kleptocracy" (as in kleptomania). He stole an estimated $4 billion from the coffers of his country and had palaces in Kinshasa, Gbadolite (his home town), Morocco, South Africa, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal. He murdered thousands of his political opponents, impoverished his country, wrecked its infrastructure (when he came to power there were 100,000 miles of paved roads in this vast country, by the time he left there were 8,000 miles of paved road). And throughout it all he was armed by the Americans, financed by the Americans, entertained by the Americans (George Bush snr had a lavish dinner for him at the White House) and maintained in power by the Americans.
And the Americans, the contemporary humanitarian invaders, stood by, in defiance of the Geneva Convention on genocide, while nearly a million Tutsis were slaughtered in the 100-day genocide in Rwanda in 1994, a genocide that spilled over and precipitated the wars in the Congo.
That is why they might have a special responsibility in the Congo.
But, more than that, there is an uncomplicated opportunity to intervene in the Congo and help bring peace, uncomplicated in a way that the engagement in Iraq has not been.
All the parties and countries engaged in the war in the Congo have signed up to a peace agreement. That peace agreement requires the intervention of international peacekeepers. All parties are agreed peacekeepers from outside countries are needed to put the Congo back together again.
There was an expectation of 50,000 peacekeepers; all the world could come up with so far is a few hundred. Even 50,000 would be far too few.
And so the killing goes on.
Ireland has played its own small part in this abandonment. We are able to provide landing and refuelling for the prosecution of an illegal war but unable to offer even a morsel of comfort to the people of a country that our partners in the US and Europe almost have destroyed.
On Monday last a Congolese was deported from here on a technicality and very many more Congolese are threatened with deportation by the Department of Justice. Apparently, the lives of Congolese are deemed not to be in sufficient danger for them to escape deportation (is three million dead in five years not enough?).
In the last few days a visitor's visa was refused to a Congolese woman engaged in human rights campaigns - no reason given so far. Indeed, the sheer discourtesy with which this application was handled bespoke a contempt for Congolese and perhaps Africans generally - inquiries being shunted from Department to Department, phone calls left unreturned, brusque dismissal of inquiries when contacts were made.
But perhaps the national interest requires it.
(P.S. Last week's column detailing the restrictions Ireland formerly placed on military overflights and landings in Ireland was based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Edward Horgan in connection with his case against the State on the Shannon landing rights. An acknowledgement of this was removed from the column at the editing stage.)