So where are you all now, you Not In My Names? Freedom is spreading across Iraq, and what have you NIMNs to say? Will you write contrite letters to this newspaper admitting that you were wrong, and that you apologise? Or will you find some excuse, yet again, to rail at the US, which is what you NIMNs do the entire time?
People who marched for peace are not NIMNs: to be opposed to war is a perfectly honourable stance. NIMNs are those who define themselves by the position taken by the US, and then take the opposite stand, like sulky 14-year-old boys towards their fathers. He cannot do right; and every course he takes is a cause of hostility, derision and protest.
NIMNia is a wonderful land to live. It's a place where you can condemn action taken by others, most especially by the US or Britain, but you are not obliged to propose any alternative course, nor are you held answerable for the consequences of doing nothing.
It is a nursery of asymmetric morality, in which the US is always guilty and NIMNs may perpetually preen themselves for always being right, even when they're fabulously wrong.
The intellectual basis of NIMNery is the slogan which is the sum amount of their thoughts: Not In My Name. But how stupid do you have to be to think that the US had sought NIMNish authorisation to liberate Iraq? And who are they reassuring on this point? Do NIMNs really think some Baathist thug believes the Pentagon sought our general permission to bomb Saddam, and he's very cross with us? Let me tell you, little rats of NIMN: if there is such an Iraqi, he's a very dim Iraqi indeed.
And what else do you feel obliged to wave your NIMN placards at, just in case the world thinks you're responsible for it? Did you haul the old posters out the night of the big wind last autumn, when all those trees were blown down? Not In My Name, you were able to declare, to the relief of the world.
When FBI vulcanologists began to wonder about Mount Etna misbehaving, killing hundreds, were you able to put their minds at ease by declaring that all that homicidal lava was Not In Your Name? And do you reassure Chileans that you have absolutely nothing to do with El Nino? Which is all fine and dandy; but where were these NIMNs when atrocities were genuinely being committed in our name? What did the smug, priggish, sanctimonious NIMNs ever do to halt the IRA campaign of violence? Did they march, did they protest, did they collect petitions, did they try to stir up popular feelings? They did nothing: silence in NIMNia, while murder was genuinely being done in their name.
No wonder a coterie of these grotesque buffoons protested outside Hillsborough at the presence of George Bush, as Iraq was trembling on the verge of liberty; for they hate America far more than they hate the oppression and murder of strangers by tyrants. Yet present inside the Hillsborough meetings were the representatives of an organisation that intentionally killed more civilians for no purpose whatever than the US accidentally killed while liberating Iraq; but these were not, are not and will not be the targets of NIMN hostility.
For NIMNs talk and behave as if the world were created for the purpose of staging selective events to which they could respond with deep indignation. They are the harlots of morality: they are free to condemn, but are also totally free of the responsibility of either duty or consequence.
Michael D. Higgins's condemnations of the IRA disqualify him from full membership of NIMNdom: but his recent tones have been steeped in NIMNery at its sickliest. I can see him now, finger in the air, in the Dáil shrieking Not In My Name, Not In My Name, NOT IN MY NAME, NOT IN MY NAME. And his mirror image in the Seanad, David Norris, has been NIMNing away to beat the band.
At least, their opposition to the IRA qualifies them merely as semi-NIMNs. Still, wherever there is (to their eyes) a morally obvious high ground, there they are, like greyback gorillas beating their breasts in a sanctimony competition, NIMNing for Ireland; and when they tire of NIMNing, they can supply that other imperishable slogan of witless moral superiority: No War For Oil! NO WAR FOR OIL! NO WAR FOR OIL! The NWFOs are even more numerous that the NIMNs, and every bit as simple. For, as it happens, oil is actually worth having a war about. Cheap oil is the oxygen of the world economy; and when that economy stumbles, we scratch our knees, but undeveloped countries fall under the bus and die.
Yet NIMNs and NWFOs are immune to such logic. So no rejoicing from them that freedom has come to the people of Iraq, courtesy of the greatest democracies in the world. No rejoicing that Saddam's torture chambers are closing. No rejoicing that murder and rape have been banished as instruments of state. No rejoicing that just 15,000 American soldiers liberated a city of 5 million people, and a couple of thousand British (and Irish) troops freed the million people of Basra.
NIMNs are pathetic people, about a pathetic purpose, one that survives in Ireland because of the extraordinary numbers of NIMNs and NWFOs in the Irish media. They were wrong on the first Gulf War, wrong on Afghanistan, wrong on this war. They'll be wrong on the next one. You see.