The United States and the IRA

Responding to Stephen Walt's hypothetical (What if Gaza were full of jews?), Megan McArdle compares the Israel lobby to the Irish-American lobby. Ross Douthat says, OK, but the IRA was still considered a terrorist organisation. Daniel Larison dives into the weeds of US attitudes towards Irish terrorism. He writes:

The IRA was a genuine terrorist group, but it was listed as such by our government most of all because it was a sworn enemy of one of our closest allies. The record seems clear: terrorist groups that are useful to us or harmful to states we officially oppose are given a pass, while those that target us or our allies are condemned in the strongest terms. That’s the nature of things in the real world, I suppose, but it is something that none of the reponses to the counterfactual seems to be taking into account. Had things gone very differently in the last century and London and Washington became enemies once more, it is very easy to imagine that the IRA or similar groups would have been made into anti-British proxies of the U.S. government.

True enough. And of course the State Department did have the IRA on its list of terrorist groups. Nonetheless, the State Department is not quite the same as the US government. And in the 1990s there's no denying that Washington generally shared the (Irish) Republican analysis of the state of play in Ulster. Indeed the Clinton administration viewed itself as a kind of backstop looking after Sinn Fein's interetss and point of view. Crucially, that's how the Republican movement saw the Americans too. They were there to provide support and ballast for the nationalist viewpoint, countering the presumed pro-Unionist bias of the British. That is to say, Dublin and Washington would, together, counter the Brits in Belfast and London. It's peace, of a sort, but it's not a result that was supposed to happen. Nor is it one that many people would have found acceptable back in, say, 1994.

Sure, Clinton made plenty of phone calls and a visit or two. But when push came to shove he refused to put additional pressure on Sinn Fein and the IRA. Consequently the Good Friday Agreement was signed despite there being a crippling ambiguity on the question of decommissioning terrorist arms. The failure to resolve that problem would cripple the peae "settlement" for years, helping to hollow-out the centre of Northern Irish politics, leading us to the present happy state of play: government by bigots and murderers.

This wasn't, obviously, all Clinton's fault. Nontheless one reason Tony Blair lost faith in the american president was Clinton's habit of promising to lean on the Republican movement and then signally failing to follow his promises with, like, actual action. The State Department may have been hostile to the IRA  -it opposed giving Gerry Adams visas to enter the US - but the rest of the US government, including the likes of Tony Lake at the National Security Council was entirely sympathetic to the "cause" of Irish Republicanism.

Daniel says:

Were it not for our very close postwar relations with London, it is hard to imagine that modern U.S. policy would have been all that different from the tolerance for Stateside Fenian and IRB organizers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the rapturous welcome accorded to the republican extremist De Valera when he visited the United States. Popular opinion in the U.S. was very much behind the Irish nationalist cause and it spread far beyond the Irish immigrant community. For a country nursed on Anglophobia, Irish republicanism appeared as a sister movement to our own fight for independence.

True enough. However, as I say, I think that there was, despite all the public pronouncements to the contrary, a kind of sotto voce enthusiasm for the IRA and its aims if not always its methods!) that persisted, despite the powerful inducements to give the British the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, it's probably not entirely coincidental that Washington became more interested in the Irish problem once a) a Democrat was back in the White House and b) the Cold War had ended, lessening British influence in Washington and the importance of assuaging British concerns. (Also, of course, Reagan was not likely to look too favourably upon the people who tried to murder his great friend Margaret.) Still, when the "peace process" got underway it didn't come as much surprise to discover that the US was in the green corner. No suprise there and it might be, too, that this was necessary. But let's not pretend that Washington was a neutral player.

Comments

[dearieme]

It was the routine US support for the IRA that made it clear that The War on Terror simply meant a war on the wrong kind of terrorists.

[ndm]

Cuba, Ireland, Israel.

Three bad situations made immensely worse by incompetent and incapable meddling by the United States in response to significant pressure groups.

[ndm]

Does anyone really believe the United States would have allowed a four-decades long occupation and settlement of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip if Jews were the victim of the occupation and not the occupiers. We need a word with the moral force of anti-Semitism to describe those who have offered nothing but appeasement and apologia to what is one of the worst crimes against humanity perpetrated in the Western World since the Second World War.

Jeffrey Goldberg, her Zionutty snotrag of a colleague, may mock Megan McArdle with his false assertion that "it's not, in fact, an act of journalistic martyrdom to criticize the Israel lobby" - but he merely shows himself to be once again willing to lie for the cause. He, of course, shows you can still be paid as a journalist no matter how much rubbish you write in support of the "cause."

[irish]

http://irishamericanheritage.com/ProcWebPages/2007.htm

[JimB]

How much of Clinton's sympathy for the IRA was due to the fact that Irish-Americans have traditionally been a core Democratic constituency? Certainly support for the IRA has been a standard feature of local Democratic politics here in New England for a long time.

[shane glackin]

"The failure to resolve that problem would cripple the peae "settlement" for years, helping to hollow-out the centre of Northern Irish politics, leading us to the present happy state of play: government by bigots and murderers."

Hmm, this seems like *very* broad strokes, Alex. I'm really not sure of the causal path that starts with "decommissioning not resolved" and ends with "those who didn't decommission and those who were most upset about it sharing power in remarkably non-fractious fashion."

[paddy]

Wow tons going on here. The immediate quibble would be you sort of seem to equate Dublin and Republicanism. Bertie and Gerry weren't exactly kissing cousins.

The analogy would have more legs if there were a John Hume and he had a constituency and if Jordan/Egypt whoever would play the role of Dublin (we like you but we don't want you but we'll pretend we do but we'll help some)

[John Thacker]

It was the routine US support for the IRA that made it clear that The War on Terror simply meant a war on the wrong kind of terrorists.

Except that routine US support for the IRA is largely concentrated among Democrats (excepting a few New York area Republicans like Peter King), including many of the same people who are generally less likely to support The War on Terror.

Under the Bush Administrations, Gerry Adams was and has been regularly denied visas to attend fundraising events. This happened under the father and under GWB. Clinton invited him to the White House for St. Patrick's Day. The US parties were *not* the same on this issue.

It's no great shock that Reagan and Clinton treated the IRA differently.

[John Thacker]

National Review and other conservative organs were consistently hard on Clinton throughout the 1990s for sucking up to the IRA to win Irish-American votes, in their opinion.

As a descendant of Ulster Scots myself, it absolutely infuriated me how much of the Clinton Administration had romantic, sympathetic ideas about the IRA.

Hate the War on Terror if you like. Hate the Clinton Administration's being on the side of the IRA if you like. But don't pretend that both policies were the work of the same people.

[John Thacker]

I, and other Republicans, agree with every word you wrote about the Clinton Administration's behavior towards the IRA. But the Administration in power at any point is not exactly the same thing as all of "Washington" either.

See this article from 1995, for example:

"HOUSE Speaker Newt Gingrich has added another dose of controversy to his resume with his decisions to side with the British government and exclude Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams from his St. Patrick's celebratory luncheon set for Thursday, March 16 on Capitol Hill. "

[ally]

Whether the official position was pro-IRA or not, and whether those in the US who supported the IRA were in a minority or not, the silver lining in 9/11 on this side of the pond was of course that American citizens finally worked out (sadly, from first principles) that giving money to terrorists gets innocent people killed. As a consequence, the IRA has found funding increasingly difficult to come back since then.

White House statements notwithstanding, the fact is that NORAID was a massive part of the problem for a very long time.

[Forlornehope]

I recall going through Boston just after 9/11. The airport was in chaos with totally ineffectual security and spotty youths from the National Guard waving rifles in manner that put the public at more hazard than any terrorist. It was interesting to reflect that after years of supporting the IRA to blow up kids in British shopping malls, once terrorism came to them the Bostonians were wetting their knickers like frightened schoolgirls.

[Alan Vanneman]

"Also, of course, Reagan was not likely to look too favourably upon the people who tried to murder his great friend Margaret."

Maybe he wasn't, but Reagan in fact did nothing to impede the flow of money and arms to the IRA from the U.S. The British Ambassador to the U.S. during the Eighties estimated that 80% of IRA funds came from the U.S. IRA fund-raising was widely practiced throughout the NYC area for decades, including (of course) the Giuliani years. Pretending that sympathy for the IRA was a Democratic thing is way off base.

[ally]

Forlornhope - you're absolutely right; I flew to Chicago in the same period and it was truly bizarre.

What is, to me at least, even more bizarre is that since 9/11 the American border agents at the various airports have, in my experience at least, actually become much more professional and friendly. Prior to that, they were clearly the most incompetent of any country I'd travelled to, and they pretty much drew with the Vietnamese in terms of being downright miserable.

There's a whole lot about post-9/11 that I don't like, but the first people I meet in America these days actually do a much better job than they used to.

[toby]

The most influential person in Ireland with regard to American policy may have been John Hume, not Gerry Adams. Hume also had enormous clout in Dublin, and Adams would never have got into the US unless Hume gave the say-so.

Hume had been visiting the US for years, assiduously courting the Kennedys and other Democratic leaders who would never be caught with an IRA man in camera view, until it was politically correct. Hume was warned that he was handing over the leadership of northern nationalists to Adams (effectively anointing the ex-IRA terrorist as his own successor) but he went ahead anyway.

Personally, I decried the compliance of the Irish and American leadership with Sinn Fein's wishes. The middle ground in Northern Ireland became hollowed out, with the two polar opposites, Sinn Fein and DUP gaining power at the expense of more moderate parties.

Now, it may all be too the good. Or was the IRA a busted flush, anyway? We will never know, bit with Sinn Fein kicking off another United Ireland campaign, it may all end it tears or worse.

[DKNY]

The IRA are the worst types of terrorists. Worse than Al Qaeda. The Irish are not opressed, they just want to play victims. Nuke the IRA.

[G]

Ira scum