Savage force was indeed used at that very time, though not against the Irish Republican Army. Irish nationalists sometimes like to claim that those rebellions were “anti-colonial,” setting a pattern for further liberation movements, which is not so. In any case, what was notable was the lenience rather than the harshness used in Ireland, even by the hated Black and Tans, compared with elsewhere.
At exactly the time of the troubles, the infant Royal Air Force was putting down a rebellion in Iraq by bombing defenseless villages into submission. It was inconceivable that the same would have been done in west Cork. Since then, Western powers have repeatedly bombed Asia and Africa. But today, bombing villages in Afghanistan and Iraq — quite apart from any ethical considerations — has proved to be by no means efficacious.
There are few more startling illustrations of this impotence of might than the pirates, or the country they come from. A hundred years ago, any one of half a dozen imperial powers could have conquered Somalia in a matter of weeks with a couple of gunboats and a few battalions.
Today Somalia has been a collapsed state for nearly 20 years, in lawless confusion that no outside power can or will subdue. It harbors bands of men in light craft armed with rifles who can seize 50,000-tonne tankers flying the flags of Western states. And there is almost nothing anyone can do, despite Sunday’s escapade.
Since 1993 and the bloody “Black Hawk down” fiasco in Mogadishu, the US has steered well clear of Somalia. They could nuke it flat, but that doesn’t quite meet the case. And that episode is instructive. The US was horrified by the loss of 18 of their men, but at least 1,000 Somalis were killed at the same time. Likewise, the US has been perturbed by the loss of more than 4,000 of its forces in Iraq, as it was dismayed by nearly 60,000 US dead in Vietnam. But those compare with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who may have been killed in the past six years, and 2 million Vietnamese dead in that war.
Nothing is more frightening to us than suicide bombing. It is indeed repugnant, but it also proves what the Roman philosopher Seneca said long ago: “The man who is not afraid to die will always be your master.”
That applies, above all, to prosperous, sybaritic, modern Western societies, which no longer have any appetite for sacrifice and suffering. Is it any wonder we are mighty but weak at once?
RSS