What, I wonder, did Bertie Ahern tell George Bush of his concerns about the prisoners in Guantanamo, or Guanama, as he called it?
Did he ask for them all to be tried? Did he ask for the application of the Geneva Conventions? Did he ask for then to be tried in their various homelands? Or did he demand their immediate and unconditional release?
Without ever seeing an opinion poll on the matter, I suspect the majority of Irish people - perhaps an overwhelming majority of Irish people - would support the last proposition. That's right. And this is a wonderful world where everything would be simply perfect if we were all that much nicer to everyone, and the Americans ended their illegal imprisonment of those innocent folks at Guantanamo, and the Israelis stopped building their wall, and everyone agreed to live in peace and harmony - hey, and don't bogard that joint, my man.
Ah, but there is no peace, no harmony, in this world. We are at war, a war which may be measured not in years but in lifetimes. The aggressive Islamic terrorist assault against Western, largely Christian, values began in the 1990s and reached a formal declaration on September 11th, 2001. And almost everything we know about the way our societies should be run is open to revision, for all our rules are made utterly redundant by suicide bombers who rejoice in massacring innocent civilians. Because for them, of course, the concept of innocence is utterly meaningless, and they recognise laws, conventions and treaties only in so far as they provide useful cover for their conspiracies to murder people.
Are the people in Guantanamo Bay innocent civilians? Weren't they just hapless tourists who were visiting Afghanistan's famous casinos and pole-dancing clubs and just got caught up in something larger than they were expecting? All they ask of the US is that they're allowed to return to their homes and their loved ones, and they'll never get into any bother again. Promise. Cross my heart.
Quite. So put yourself in the position of the US president. On the one hand, you can agree with the pole-dancing thesis, and though you personally deplore pole-dancing, you can see why there's no reason to detain those folks any longer, and you send them packing. Or on the other, you get real, and you say that these people were combatants in Afghanistan, serving either the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Does it make any sense whatever to let these people return to their homelands to reconnect with the terrorist networks which send them to Afghanistan in the first place?
What about the Geneva Conventions? Good question. What about them? None of the Geneva Conventions apply to them because they are not lawful combatants in a lawful war. Which is not to say that they shouldn't be treated humanely. But they are prisoners, and there is no way that the US can simply allow them their freedom while the global war continues.
In a sense, it's a great shame that George Bush announced the global war on terror as if the initiative were being taken by him and the US. In fact, the opposite was the case. The war began in the last century, and it erupted right across the world at the instigation of Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. They are waging jihad against the infidel, and their holy war knows no boundaries, nor law, nor convention, nor restraint. Do you not understand this? The golden days are over. They shall not return in our lifetimes.
Indeed, it is almost like a bad James Bond plot-line. The Islamicists do genuinely seek global domination. They have received their mandate from heaven, from Allah. They want an all-Islamic world just as Philip of Spain wanted a Catholic one, and they will stop at nothing to procure it. Moreover, they do their sums. They see the demographics of Africa and Eurasia and conclude that the arithmetic is in their favour. But they do not want to rely on mere time to bring about their avowed goals of a Muslim world: they are warriors, who seek to die in holy war to win the utter paradise that only a warrior can win.
Hundreds of such warriors are in the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Would you release them? Would you? And then on whose shoulders would fall the moral responsibility for what they do on their release? Will these ex-prisoners start collecting money to fight world hunger? Or will they sign on instead for the nuclear studies course at their local al-Qaeda night school?
Yes, yes, I can hear people saying that we must remove the root causes of terrorism; we must eradicate global injustice, third world poverty, disproportionate allocation of resources, blah blah blah. This is the equivalent of some pacifist in 1944 saying that the Allies should attack the root causes of Nazism by eradicating the structural injustices of the Weimar Republic. Yes, indeed, and all those SS men in prisoner of war camps, they were just on holiday in France, and they should be allowed to return to their families this very instant.
But even in the mind of the most pious, appeasing Eurobabbler, there must be a still, small voice which speaks of the dark reality of the times. we live in. For no concession to the jihadistas will win us peace. No surrender will be met with moderation. No compromise will be answered in kind. For we have no more choice in the matter than we have over the movement of the planets. The world, alas, is at war.