Editorial: Ireland facilitates a war it said would be illegal

We now also facilitate the gross abuse of the human rights of suspects who are abducted and tortured

The absence of public debate, especially in the Dáil, on the continued use of Shannon as a facility for the American war machine in Iraq and as a conduit for aircraft engaged in the abduction and torture of suspects, betokens precisely the degeneration of our politics that our lead story this week addresses. The use of the airport in facilitation of a war that, implicitly, Ireland said was illegal is incomprehensible. The complicity in the abduction and torture of prisoners is deplorable.

Just to recap on the issue of legality. In November 2002 Ireland was a member of the United Nations Security Council and voted in favour of the now infamous resolution 1441 which gave Iraq a final chance to comply with UN resolutions on disarmament or otherwise face “serious consequences”. When Iraq was decreed by the Americans and the British to have failed to have complied with that resolution – incidentally, they were quite wrong about that – the Americans and British used the terms of resolution 1441 to justify their subsequent invasion of Iraq.

They had a sliver of justification for doing so because the terms of the 1441 resolution were ambiguous, although their subsequent attempt to get a further resolution through the UN Security Council specifically authorising invasion, belied those claims – if they had justification from resolution 1441 why did they bother to seek a further mandate? But there was a sliver of justification.

Ireland might have taken refuge in the sliver of justification as a pretext for allowing Shannon to be used in the war in Iraq were it not for one salient fact. Prior to the vote being taken in the Security Council in November 2002 on resolution 1441, Ireland stated it would be for the Security Council to decide on any ensuing action against Iraq in the event of further Iraqi non-compliance with UN resolutions. In saying that, unlike the Americans and the British, we were clearly nailing our colours to the mast that resolution 1441 did not authorise action were the Iraqis to continue to deny the UN, and that a further resolution of the Security Council would be required.

How then could it be that Ireland would regard the American and British invasion of Iraq as other than illegal? We said another UN resolution would be required to authorise action; the Americans and British went ahead in the absence of that further resolution; clearly, in Ireland's view, what they did was illegal. How then can we legitimate the use of Shannon in facilitation of a war which, according to ourselves, was illegal?

But it is far worse than that.

We now know that Iraq was not in breach of UN resolutions on disarmament, it had none of the weapons the UN Security Council demanded it surrender. Only in a technical sense – that it failed to give proof it had no such arms – was it in breach. No war conceivably could have been authorised or justified on the basis of a mere failure to provide adequate documentation.

So we are now in a position where we are facilitating a war we ourselves deemed to be illegal at the outset and we continue to facilitate that war after we have realised that there was no conceivable justification for that war in the first place.

It might be argued – indeed it is argued – that this is mere sophistry; that the war against Iraq was legitimated by the barbarous natured of the Saddam Hussein regime. Were it the case in international law and practice that the world community intervened in states where they were gross abuses of human rights, as there was in Iraq, then this would be a persuasive argument. But it is not the case in international law and practice for such interventions to occur.

Worse than that, those countries that now profess to justify their involvement in Iraq on this ex-post facto basis were the very countries that armed, supported and encouraged Saddam Hussein precisely at the time when he was engaged in the grossest human rights abuses – the invasion of another sovereign country, Iran, and the use of chemical and biological weapons in the course of that war which cost the lives of over one million people.

Furthermore, it was known and predicted well in advance of the invasion of Iraq that any such intervention would have catastrophic consequences in terms of the stability of the country and the uneasy balance between the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites. The carnage that we witness daily on our television screens was a known consequence of such involvement. So far from wishing to uphold the human rights of Iraqis, the invasion went ahead without care for the consequences to the welfare of Iraqis and with indifference to the inevitable chaos that would ensue.

The claim on the part of anti-war activists that America was not interested in the welfare of Iraqis but concerned merely to secure a strategic stronghold in the Middle East and to control Iraqi oil now seems all the more plausible. It is that we are now continuing to facilitate.

But it is even worse than that.

We now also know that in the course of its alleged “war on terror” America itself has engaged in gross human rights abuses, in its treatment of prisoners in Iraq, its treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and its abduction and transportation of suspects to countries where they are routinely tortured and degraded.

We do not know for certain that such suspects have been transported by the Americans through Shannon but we do know for certain that the aircraft used in these abductions have come through Shannon on numerous occasions, more than such aircraft have gone through bases even in the territory of America's closest ally in this escapade, Britain.

One way or another we are facilitating the war, which we ourselves said would be illegal, and now also further facilitating egregious abuse of human rights and breaches of international law.

And not a word of protest.

Well, hardly.

VINCENT BROWNE