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Irish Examiner 22/2/2025

Article

Europe needs more peacemakers and fewer armies.

John F Kennedy spoke these words on 10^th June 1963: “the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war, but we have no more urgent task”.

I joined the Irish Defence Forces on 28 September 1963, and John F Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963. Promoting peace and justice can be dangerous for the peacemakers including JFK. Eighty-six Irish soldiers, many of whom I knew, gave their lives for the justified cause of international peace. Ireland must continue to promote peace by peaceful means only and avoid joining foreign armies and wars of aggression.

The TINA syndrome which stands for “There Is No Alternative” was in vogue after the economic crash and austerity crisis. That TINA syndrome is now being applied to the militarisation of Europe. There were alternatives to the imposition of austerity, and there are alternatives to the militarisation of Europe, which has already played a significant role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of European people. These alternatives include making peace by peaceful nonviolent means. The costs of militarisation and the destruction of wars is immense.

The estimated world military expenditure for 2023, was $2443 billion. This does not include the huge costs of wars to countries being destroyed. The alternative is to spend most of these billons on conflict prevention, including transforming the UN and restoring the proper rule of international and humanitarian laws and jurisprudence.

A BBC report on 16 February 2025 states that: “Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for the creation of an army of Europe”. Many European countries are reported to be in full war preparation mode. It is not clear whether this would be a European Union (EU) army or wider European army.

Thirty-four European countries have national armies. NATO is the world’s largest regional military force. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven EU states are full members of NATO, and the three neutrals including Ireland are members of NATO’s Partnership for Peace. This might not be so bad if NATO was a genuine defensive alliance. Since the end of the Cold War NATO member states have been waging aggressive resource wars in breach of the UN Charter in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere and supporting Israeli war crimes amounting to genocide against the Palestinian people.

The Warsaw Pact was disbanded in 1991 after assurances were given to Russian leaders that NATO would not expand, “not one inch eastward”. Since 1999 NATO has expanded from 19 member states to 32, taking in former eastern European states up to Russia’s borders.

Ireland should avoid entanglement with NATO or European armies. The Irish Defence Forces has been a volunteer army since the foundation of the State. Until the 1990s Irish soldiers had to volunteer before being sent on UN peace missions. Now, they can be compelled to serve on overseas missions including NATO ones. This is one of the reasons that our citizens are unwilling to join the Defence Forces, and why our soldiers are leaving the Defence Forces. Irish positive neutrality is the best way to defend the best interests of the Irish people and the wider interests of humanity. Our neutrality has been virtually ended due to Irish soldiers serving with NATO, proposed abandonment of the Triple Lock, helping to train Ukrainian soldiers to kill Russian soldiers, and serving with EU military Battlegroups, and neocolonial missions in Africa.  If Irish soldiers are killed on such missions their deaths will not have been justified.

After the end of the Cold War the alternatives to the militarisation of Europe should have been a bright new dawn of peace and economic cooperation across Eurasia. A buffer zone of neutral states should have been created from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. That opportunity was lost due to US determination to be the world’s unipolar superpower. Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons and became a neutral state, but this neutrality was ended in 2014. Attempts to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine conflict by the Helsinki process failed. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian people have died. Many more will die unless peaceful alternatives are created to replace the militarisation of Europe. More European armies are the problem, not the solution.

Those who argue that Ireland should defend its people by conventional military means, should consider the likely financial costs and lives lost, and the peaceful alternatives. Neutral Austria is considering purchasing 58 new Leopard tanks at €29,000,000 each.

In this nuclear armed 21st cen­tury, the time to stop wars is now, before they start, if humanity is to have a future.

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Edward Horgan, Commandant (retired), is a former UN peacekeeper. He completed a PhD thesis on reform of the United Nations in 2008

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THE KERRYMAN
19/02/2025

EU lead­ers are in ‘full war pre­par­a­tion mode’, let’s hope it’s not unstop­pable

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SIR,

For­eign Affairs and Defence Min­is­ter, Tánaiste Simon Har­ris, has been briefed that many of Ire­land’s EU part­ners are in ‘full war pre­par­a­tion mode’. War hys­teria seems to have taken hold of far too many inter­na­tional polit­ical lead­ers. Such hys­teria is in danger of becom­ing an unstop­pable force, fuelled by unjus­ti­fied Russo-pho­bia or China-pho­bia and by the human greed scramble for access to valu­able resources.

The pho­to­graphs and videos of the destruc­tion in Gaza and Ukraine should be a warn­ing of the dev­ast­a­tion that may occur in many other coun­tries if com­mon sense and san­ity fail to pre­vail, lead­ing to wars at inter­na­tional or global level. The people of coun­tries dev­ast­ated in World War Two, espe­cially Ger­many, Japan, Rus­sia and China, need to be reminded of the destruc­tion of cit­ies like Ham­burg, Dresden, Stal­in­grad, Tokyo, Naga­saki and Hiroshima.

The pop­u­la­tion of these cit­ies, and world pop­u­la­tion, has increased sub­stan­tially since World War Two. The destruct­ive power of weapons and muni­tions has also increased, as demon­strated by the use of 2,000-pound bombs dropped on the people of Gaza and the 11-ton GBU-43/B MOAB bomb ‘suc­cess­fully tested’ on Afghan people in 2017.

If a major con­ven­tional war occurs, many major cit­ies and their people could be reduced to rubble like Gaza has been. Up to 40 mil­lion civil­ians died due to World War Two. If such a major war goes nuc­lear, all of planet Earth may be reduced to rubble.

Instead of fol­low­ing the example of Sweden and Fin­land, Ire­land must strengthen our pos­it­ive neut­ral­ity and use it to pro­mote peace and justice for all of human­ity and Irish sol­diers must only par­ti­cip­ate in for­eign mis­sions that are under a UN man­date.

In this 21st cen­tury, the time to stop wars is before they start.

Sin­cerely,

Edward Hor­gan, Cas­tle­t­roy,Lim­er­ick.

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