Respect is absent for the other victims

Why has there been not even a whisper of concern over the lives slaughtered in Afghanistan?

Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney and other notables will attend a private commemoration today for the victims of the terrorist attacks on the US a year ago. Mary McAleese and TDs will observe a minute's silence. There will be commemoration services in churches and a synagogue. Bertie Ahern has said these ceremonies "reflect the deeply-felt horror of the Irish people at the human suffering" of a year ago today.

All of these commemorations will also reflect a disregard for the thousands of lives lost in Afghanistan and elsewhere as part of the retaliation for the atrocities of a year ago.

What is so special about the 3,000 lives lost in the Twin Towers, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon? Why should these lost lives alone be commemorated? Why has there been not even a whisper of concern over the lives slaughtered by the retaliatory American bombings in Afghanistan?

Today's remembrances of the victims of the attacks of a year ago will express their own message of disrespect for those Afghans and others who were killed, maimed and bereaved, for they do not count in our sympathies or concern.

The commemorations will serve another purpose also. They will signal to the United States an empathy for the plans that are afoot to extend the retaliatory response further afield, probably most immediately to Iraq.

Within minutes of the attack on the Twin Towers, Donald Rumsfield ordered the preparation of a massive strike against the regime of Saddam Hussein, even after he was advised that there was no reason to suspect that Saddam had anything to do with the atrocity.

From the very moment of the attack it was perceived as an opportunity.

An opportunity to finish the "unfinished business" of the last Bush administration. An opportunity to establish in the economically crucial and politically volatile Middle East a regime that would be avowedly pro-American and would protect American interests in the face of an increasingly destabilised Saudi Arabia. And we are expected to believe a strike against Iraq is to prevent a nuclear threat.

A year ago the CIA published a report for the US Congress on "the acquisition of technology relating to weapons of mass destruction and advanced conventional munitions".

That report said Iraq had significant biological and chemical weapons capacities. It dealt with the issue of nuclear capacity in a paragraph of just 63 words, saying while Iraq "probably" had continued a low-level research and development nuclear programme, "a sufficient source of fissile material remains Iraq's most significant obstacle to being able to produce a nuclear weapon".

Clearly, the CIA did not believe Iraq's acquisition of nuclear capacity was likely or worrying.

In the last few days the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London has said almost the same thing: "Iraq does not possess facilities to produce fissile material in sufficient amounts for nuclear weapons.... It would require several years and extensive foreign assistance to build such fissile material production facilities."

The argument about Saddam being "an outlaw" who has used chemical weapons against his own people is a contrivance.

He used chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Iranians in 1988. At that very time the Americans, who knew full well what he was about, were giving him assistance by way of intelligence and otherwise in the conduct of the war against Iran.

Indeed, American conduct throughout that awful war (it is estimated that a million people were killed) itself constitutes a crime against humanity. They gave arms to Iran (and, incidentally, gave the proceeds from the sale of those arms to terrorists in Nicaragua) and intelligence assistance to Iran and then tilted towards Iraq and gave it assistance, all to keep the war going.

And, in the course of that war, the much vaunted UN Security Council at first refused to condemn Iraq for its attack on Iran and then ignored the war for several years.

If, or rather when, the US attacks Iraq, success seems virtually certain because of its overwhelming military superiority. But what then? The American attack on Afghanistan dislodged the Taliban,but what else did it achieve? Did it defeat al-Qaeda? Did it diminish or increase the terrorist threat to th US? Did it bring peace to Afghanistan?

Al-Qaeda is still active. The threat to the US from terrorism is now greater; certainly the CIA and FBI appear to believe that. Afghanistan is still a violent mess. And look what it did to inflame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, worse still, the Indian-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir.

An invasion of Iraq will destabilise Arab regimes through the region, in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and the Gulf states. Also, probably, Turkey, Egypt and other north African states. It will intensify the conflict in Israel. Its ramifications may spread to Indonesia, the Philippines and Pakistan. And it will lead to the killing of thousands and thousands of people, soldiers and innocents.

vbrowne@irish-times.ie