A Dispatch from Ireland. Second part
So who’s to blame for the lagging Irish support for the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan?
In part, it’s the U.S., suggests Sunday Times (Ireland edition) columnist David Quinn. Writing in the National Review On-Line last week, Quinn pointed the finger at the failure of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin to effectively counteract the anti-U.S. bias exhibited by much of the Irish media.
On one level, I would agree. In the Irish Times a columnist laments, “How did the world get to believe that terror and slaughter delivered by a bomb in a car was an atrocity; while much more terror and much more slaughter by airplane or missile is morally ok?” In the Irish Examiner another columnist mocks the futile “Bush fire…to smoke out Osama Bin Laden.”
There’s a proclivity among journalists here to focus on the negative humanitarian impact of the bombings with little or no emphasis on the reasons behind them. Of course, it doesn’t help that former Irish president and now UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson has called for the suspension of the U.S. air strikes against Afghanistan. How about calling for the destruction of Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network? How about acknowledging that Bin Laden and his cohorts in the Taliban regime are the ones responsible for the suffering of the Afghan people?
But beyond the general media bias, the Emerald Isle is, itself, a study in contradictions. Externally pacific and internally riven, it has long grappled with its own versions of homegrown terrorism. The last thing the Irish want (or anyone else for that matter) is to be confronted with a Third World War. They have enough problems in their own backyard. Neutrality—at the international level—is in their blood. This is the same nation who sat out WWII, if you recall.
On a deeper level, the anti-U.S. sentiment has much to do with the fundamentals of power and human nature. After all, everybody wants power and nobody likes the guy who has too much of it. With our European allies and friends, this tension has always existed. Their sudden “concern” for Afghanistan can be seen as a symptom of this deeper cleavage. Despite official expressions of support, many Europeans, at heart, don’t really like U.S. power. They would prefer that they, not the U.S., call the shots.
Whoever said realpolitik was out of date?