There will not be much reason to worry about the Shannon stopover for a while. It's going to be fairly busy down there with tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans streaming through in the next few months, writes Vincent Browne
The Americans like Shannon. There is a long runway there and, unlike other possible stopovers in Britain and Germany, it is not congested. Not much hassle either. The Germans are not too keen on that kind of transit traffic at present and even in Britain where there is official enthusiasm for that kind of thing, there is a vigorous popular movement opposed to it.
It's the Kuwait round-trip. Too long for American transport planes to do in one hop, so Shannon is convenient. The Bush administration is planning on sending 200,000 to 250,000 troops to the Gulf and many of them will have a chance to savour an Irish coffee in the transit lounge.
Not that most of them will have a clue where they are and there is nothing in the airport to tell them. (Thousands and thousands of Russians must have gone through the airport in the last 20 years on the long trip from Moscow to Havana or Mexico and not a sign in Russian even to tell them where the leithreas is.)
The Americans will be ferrying B-2 bombers each capable of carrying 16 one-tonne satellite-guided bombs and B-1 bombers each capable of carrying 24 satellite-guided bombs. They won't be going through Shannon or will they? Anyway, why not? In for a penny.
The eager expectation in both Washington and London is that Saddam Hussein will fail to meet the rigorous requirements of Resolution 1441 of the Security Council, passed unanimously last Friday, and that war will quickly ensue. Geoff Hoon, the British Secretary of State for Defence, said this a few days ago and Colin Powell's reputation is depending on it.
There is a requirement on the Security Council to meet once it is established that the Iraqis have tripped into one of the many snares that have been set for them but George Bush said on Friday that America is not interested in further haggling over what should happen.
"With the passage of this resolution, the world must not lapse into unproductive debates over whether specific instances of Iraqi non-compliance are serious," he said. "If Iraq fails to fully comply, the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein." So much for consultation.
The regime of Saddam Hussein is certainly a menace to Iraq and may be to its immediate neighbours (although that is now very much in doubt). Certainly it is not a menace to America or the world. It could be that very potent menace to the world is America.
A WEEK ago America violated the sovereignty of an independent state and, quite deliberately, killed six people. This state had never threatened America, never perpetrated violence against America, posed no danger to America. The state is Yemen and the people killed were supposedly members of al- Qaeda, one of them, incidentally, an American citizen.
Of all the barbarities perpetrated by the American ally Israel, targeted assassination of the kind which America perpetrated in Yemen is one of the few atrocities that America has been willing to condemn. But, it emerges, George Bush has authorised the CIA to engage in such operations, in obvious violation of international law. We should not have been surprised.
In the National Security Strategy published just two months ago, the Bush administration made it quite clear that it regarded America as outside the realm of international law.
It announced its intention to take what it called "pre-emptive action" against any organisation of any state it considers to be a threat to the United States. It proclaimed it would not "hesitate to act alone" and that it was willing to "compel" states to accept what America deemed to be their "sovereign responsibilities". It said "it is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength" and that it must "dissuade further military competition" to the United States.
To achieve this it requires bases throughout the world and, it went on, "our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in the hopes of surpassing or equalling the power of the Untied States".
And, by the by, it made it clear that Americans would not be impaired in these endeavours by "potential for investigations, inquiry or prosecution by the International Criminal Court".
Perhaps our timid challenge to America at the Security Council last week by feigning to support a requirement that no military action could be taken against Iraq without further Security Council sanction was heroic after all, even if we then joined all the other would-be dissidents and backed off?
Yemen was on the Security Council in 1990 when America first wanted to attack Iraq. It voted against war. The American UN ambassador told his Yemeni counterpart it was the most expensive "no" in history. We could not afford that, not now anyway, given what Charlie McCreevy has done to our public finances.
So, they can have Shannon and, if they like, Knock and Farranfore as well. And good luck to them.
Pity about the Iraqis though.