Changing the ‘special relationship’

COMMENT

The reaction of the British and American governments to the release on Wikileaks of almost 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq war were stunning in their irony.

According to The Guardian, “The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the UK’s Ministry of Defence are suggesting the disclosures put lives at risk.”
This statement was made in the context of the documents which detail a far higher number of civilian casualties in Iraq than previously thought by the website Iraqbodycount and also details regarding the turning over of prisoners to Iraqi torturers by United States soldiers. The total number of deaths estimated from the documents is 109,000 including 66,000 civilians.
The statements from the US and British governments reveal a deep truth regarding each administration’s concern for actual harm as opposed to casualties among their own soldiers. If either government were concerned with lives being put at risk then surely neither the invasion itself or the almost apocalyptic aftermath would have been allowed to go ahead. Perhaps I have been too tame in my language. For either government to speak in the terms they have is gross hypocrisy and nothing less.
For years, the use of Shannon Airport by the US military has been justified to the Clare public as being part of Ireland’s special relationship with the US. What is clear for all to see in these documents is that the country with which Ireland makes efforts to maintain this special relationship is engaged in activities that are just as depraved as those they seek to hunt in geopolitical terms.
Among the more disturbing revelations in the leaked documents is that the United States learned the lessons of Abu Ghraib not in the sense that they began to respect the Geneva Conventions but found a way to navigate them.
Instead of torturing suspects themselves they merely turned a blind eye as the suspects were turned over to a group of Iraqis known as the ‘Wolf Battalion’.
These former members of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard were known to use electric drills in their notoriously brutal torture regime.
The Guardian quotes the leaked documents with regard to one particular incident as follows, “On 14 December 2005, a raid was conducted whereby five individuals were detained for suspicion of emplacement of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] as a result of a pid [positive identification]. “During the interrogation process, the RO [ranking officer] threatened the subject detainee that he would never see his family again and would be sent to the Wolf Battalion, where he would be subject to all the pain and agony that the Wolf Battalion is known to exact upon its detainees.”
Among the reasons for allowing the US military to use Shannon Airport in the past was the importance of maintaining the special relationship.
Is it not time to ask where this has got us? Thanks to Dublin’s interference in the running of Shannon, the airport was forced to make itself dependant on a number of revenue streams from questionable sources. The American military on the one hand and Ryanair on the other. Not a very savoury pair of bed fellows.
If money was what the Shannon Airport Authority were after in terms of allowing military flights to use Shannon, then why not allow Iran, Syria and North Korea to fly through and refuel.
Perhaps the most obvious answer would be that these are rogue states engaged in nefarious activities such as torture, kidnapping and nuclear bomb procurement.
Put like this, Ireland has thrown its lot in with the United States only because we share their values or, more correctly, we want to be on the winning side, regardless of morals.
Standing up against American hegemony would not go down very well in the European Union either. Especially not now that Ireland is so deeply in debt and having to dance to the tune of the international economic community.
Such betrayals do not lead to investment. Economically and ethically, there is little difference between accepting the money of the United States or any of the nations listed above. While there is little chance that the opportunity will ever arrive for Shannon to charge in Iranian rials or North Korean won, the ethical implications of our servitude should be considered.
If a country does not stand for anything internationally then how can it be believed to stand for anything nationally? Ireland bans torture internally but it consorts with torturers internationally. Ireland rules out the kidnapping of suspects internally but stands idly by why its land is used to facilitate it by other international actors.
If this sounds over simplistic, then the charge is accepted but it raises the question of where truth should arise at all. If all politics is merely a moulding of the lie into a publically palatable form of ‘truth’, where do the real answers lie?
It begs the question of where the lines of division are drawn. A politician must tell the truth at local level, less of the truth but still the truth at national level and at international level, just follow the bully in the playground and agree with them. This is essentially the system with which we concur through acceptance and participation.
Irony comes back with a vengeance in the realisation that citizens of the Shannon Region, of Ireland, as a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, must hope that America continues to engage in its campaign in Iraq by whatever means they choose to employ.
If that nation were to adhere to the rules of war as outlined in that agreement it would have to pull out of Iraq because its position would be untenable.
The same would be true of Afghanistan. Some of those employed at Shannon Airport refer to the, very rare, smoking area off the duty free as ‘Guantanamo’ and they are not far from the truth.