Edward Horgan's article on Irish troops fighting for "the West against the rest" (The Irish Times, May 25th) was as remarkable for its passion as it was for its confusion and inaccuracies. writes Tony Kinsella.
It argued that the United Nations is a good model for international co-operation, while all others are bad, mixing that with criticism of Irish Army officers. Underlying the whole argument was an image of some idyllic purity of Irish neutrality.
The essential expression of Irish neutrality was the State's non-participation in the second World War - in fact several decisions, made and maintained over a six-year period of shifting global realities. Whatever the validity of the original September 1939 decision, by the end of 1944 the maintenance of Irish neutrality had become as morally repugnant as it was practically stupid.
The article almost posed the essence of politics - where do you draw the line between principled positions and practical realities? In 2003 our world watched its only superpower behave irrationally and undermine half a century of attempts to build international institutions as the US embarked on its foolish and incompetent invasion of Iraq. Some 900,000 US troops may have transited through Shannon since March 2003, but how many millions have been shipped through Germany, or Belgium? How many flights have been handled across French airspace?
Once the US persisted in its illegal invasion, the focus for others had to shift to the post-Iraq, post-George W Bush world. The world order we grew up with was defined by the Cold War standoff between the two superpowers. The collapse of the USSR left us with one. The US, as a global power, has democratically chosen to fritter away its military power on a pointless war in Iraq. How then are we to construct a different, and hopefully better, global order?
European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) is an element of the answer. It works more in support of the United Nations than as a rival to it.The disgraceful French Operation Turquoise to Rwanda in 1994 was unilateral, not an EU Battlegroup. The deployment of troops outside state borders without UN Security Council approval need not be a breach of the UN Charter. If sovereign states agree such deployments they are completely legal.
The English title of the EU groups is unfortunate - in French they are Groupes Tactiques. The Irish contribution will be a reinforced battalion, about 850 troops, most likely the Rangers with support units. While it could involve Scorpion light tanks, it would almost certainly include the state-of-the-art Mowag armoured personnel carriers. It is planned that the Irish contingent will integrate the Nordic group, with Estonia, Finland and Sweden. English will be the command-and-control language as these countries share no other common language. Training will reduce the chances of friendly fire casualties. Sweden, and to a lesser extent Finland, have long been champions of an active neutrality-based foreign policy. Irish integration into such a group makes perfect sense.
ESDP decisions are taken by consensus. Each member state retains veto power, and no military unit can be deployed without the agreement and participation of the national government in question. Any Irish deployment within an EU battlegroup will be subject to our triple-lock mechanism - UN Security Council mandate, government and Oireachtas approval. Other European democracies have evolved different decision-making mechanisms on their participation in foreign deployments.
Two military deployment images illustrate the challenges we collectively face as we feel our way forward to some form of global security system. One is of an Australian military unit deployed to Banda Aceh following the 2004 tsunami. It was a water purification unit, and was up and running, distributing clean drinking water to traumatised residents, within 48 hours.
Months, perhaps years, of training had gone into making that possible. The right equipment, packed in the right way, could be flown to Sumatra, unloaded and operated within two days. The deployment included a security element, to protect the unit and its beneficiaries. They had no UN mandate, but a request from the Indonesian government made their presence perfectly legal.
The second is of the hapless Dutch battalion in Srebrenica forced to stand by as Bosnian Serb forces massacred 8,000 Bosnian men. Srebrenica had been designated by the UN Security Council as a safe area. The UN troops were fully authorised to use force to defend that area. Armed F-16s of the Royal Netherlands air force had been over Srebrenica for days as the Bosnian Serbs moved in. The Dutch government had authorised them to attack the Serb columns, the UN had agreed, but somewhere in the confused UN/Nato/Western European Union command-and-control structures, nobody would take the final decision. Srebrenica was our collective failure. We all failed to deploy the necessary means, and we lacked the necessary operational structures to use the limited means actually deployed. European public opinion was far ahead of its political leadership, demanding the use of force to end the barbarity of the Bosnian war.
An EU battlegroup deployed to Darfur in support of African Union forces could be extraordinarily effective. The failure of US military power would suggest that any future major crisis could require a UN force composed of one or more EU battlegroups operating with Brazilian, Indian and South African forces. The deployment of well-trained and equipped Irish troops within such a battlegroup is not a question of "vigilantes" or of the "West against the rest", but rather one of us shouldering our part of a necessary burden.