Pandora's Box

I was going through my files the other day, and I found this.
It is an editorial I wrote when I was editor of Ireland's Sunday Tribune newspaper back in March 2003.
At the time, all of the other Irish newspapers prevaricated about the US led invasion of Iraq.
But I was pretty sure about what I thought.
Indeed, when my then managing director aksed me a0 to reconsider or b) to run a contra view on the same page, I refused both requests.
I lost my job, for unconnected reasons, two years later.
This is what I wrote - and by the way, I don't think it took any particular genius to see back then, what was going to happen:

"IT LOOKS increasingly like the opening of Pandora's Box.
The quick war - not that a quick more is any more tasteful than a slow one - promised by Bush and Blair is already a broken promise. And even though much, if not most, of what we are being told in news reports from Iraq is patently untrue, it is clear that already there have been hundreds if not thousands of casualties.

British and American have died, been wounded or captured.

Towns and cities have been all but levelled by constant bombing.

Ordinary citizens are living in conditions of extreme hardship without food, water or electricity and the prospect of disease lurks large.

The long-suffering Iraqi people are being victimised by both sides. Iraqi troops are killing their own people as they attempt to flee. At least, that's what we're being told.

On top of this carnage and misery, we now have Bush and Blair telling us they will persist with their ugly, brutal war "no matter how long it takes". For "no matter how long it takes" read "no matter how many are killed or wounded".

So what if it takes months or years?

Will Bush launch an election campaign in a couple of years time with body bags and broken bodies arriving back in the United States on a daily basis?

Will he achieve his aim of ousting Saddam after a long and costly war, costly in terms of money and lives, and then simply walk away, leaving to the mortally-wounded United Nations the well-nigh impossible task of trying to pick up the pieces?

Or will he eventually lose patience and use the ultimate weapon of mass destruction?

It is hard to predict what this man will do or, more accurately, what he will be told to do by his hawkish advisors, businessmen all of whom have a clear vested interest in the prosecution and outcome of this war. (Already a massive $1.9bn contract for the "rebuilding" of Iraq has been awarded to the company of which Dick Cheney was CEO prior to his becoming vice president. ) Patience is not a word you can associate with George W Bush. He is in the White House only because the US Supreme Court lost patience with the Florida recount. He went to war having lost patience with the UN weapons inspectors, although Saddam had destroyed half his al-Samoud missiles. He has now lost patience with the speed of his troops' advance on Baghdad and ordered more young men and women to the Gulf where they may kill or be killed.

When Bush opened this particular Pandora's box, he destroyed European unity, he destroyed East/West unity, he all but destroyed the United Nations, he wounded the world economy, with all that means for ordinary people everywhere, and he provoked the kind of protests worldwide that gave succour to the Iraqi regime.

What else will emerge from this box before this dreadful business is finished?"