The Debatable Land

Could You Go A Chicken Supper, Bobby Sands*?

Exciting fast food wars update: faithful reader MT alerts me to something I should have known myself. Not only is the British embassy in Tehran located on Bobby Sands Street, there is a Bobby Sands burger joint in hip and happening Tehran too.

Andrew McKie has also considered the ideological implications - nay, temptations - of the chip shop wars. As he suggests: "Fish supper, chicken supper. A theological and geopolitical minefield. This calls for a book, really."

Quite so.

*Explanatory note: During Bobby Sands' hunger strike fans at Glasgow Rangers and Heart of Midlothian, among, I think, other clubs, would sing, to the tune of "She's Coming Round the Mountain", "Could you go a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?/Could you go a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?/Could you go a chicken supper, you dirty Fenian fucker/Could you go a chicken supper Bobby Sands." That is, would the IRA prisoner care to eat a dinner of fried chicken and french fries? This song was, as you might imagine, particularly popular during matches against Glasgow Celtic. Feelings were, er, running high.

A Protestant fish for a Protestant people?

I've had occasion to salute the glories of the Scottish fish and chip shop before - where else can you obtain a deep-fried kebab pizza? - but when it comes to naming chippies, I'm not sure there's many that can beat this Belfast emporium:

That's right folks: For Cod and Ulster, where the King Billy's Family Feast will only set you back £16.90 (of course!). In an ecumenical touch - in keeping with the patina of the times -  they do however serve a Gerry Adams burger.

Why-oh-why-oh why does Obama hate the Irish?

In the name of the wee man, has it come to this? Apparently it has. Barack Obama has not "committed" himself to appointing a US "Special Envoy" to Northern Ireland. He believes, a spokesman said, that the "crisis point" in Ulster has passed. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual Irish-American suspects. Cue too, to no-one's great surprise, this response from Team McCain:

Barack Obama, once again demonstrating his total lack of experience and profoundly poor judgment on matters of foreign policy, has issued a statement questioning 'whether a special U.S. envoy for Northern Ireland continues to be necessary.'

The special U.S. envoy was first appointed by President Clinton and has been critical to fostering peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

John McCain is committed to maintaining the special U.S. envoy for Northern Ireland and that commitment has been enshrined in the 2008 Republican Platform. That Sen. Obama would be willing to toss aside one of the signature diplomatic accomplishments of the Clinton administration and put the progress in Northern Ireland at risk is only further evidence that he is simply not ready to lead.

Well, I'd be interested to know if any of the senior players in the McCain camp, let alone the candidate himself, could actually name the curent envoy (it's Paula Dobriansky). I'd be even more astonished if they could point to anything the envoy is supposed to be doing that goes anyway beyond the mouthing of platitudes and the usual back-slapping and glad-handing.

Certainly, McCain's statement is, shall we say, inconsistent? If the "Peace Process" has been such a success and amounts to being a "signature diplomatic accomplishment" you might think an envoy was no longer required. Clue: the word "accomplishment" has to mean something, even for Presidential candidates.

Now, as it happens I take the (admittedly minority) view that the Peace Process has, in many respects, been a grievous disappointment. Or, as I've argued before, we have arrived at a destination that would once have been sign-posted Failure and chosen to label it Success instead. Still, if everyone agrees to pretend that it is instead a triumph, it is reasonable to wonder what the role of this American representative is supposed to be and why, exactly, Obama is demonstrating his lack of judgment by suggesting that changing circumstances might justify changing policy. 

Of course, McCain has no interest in any of this. It's just a stick with which to rile the Clintons, each of whom labour under the misapprehension that they delivered "peace" to Northern Ireland. Unwittingly, however, this absurdity demonstrates that McCain's not interested in letting the "facts" interfere with his policy-making decisions anywhere...

UPDATE: Ben Smith reminds one that, back in the early to mid-1990s, McCain sharply criticised the Clintons' continual willingness to give Sinn Fein the benefit of the doubt.

The DUP's Calculation

MPs are voting on 42 Days now. I only watched the last part of the debate and am biased in favour of the opposition but even so, the weakness of the case made by Jacqui Smith and her lackeys was startling. Still, the funniest comment on the whole ghastliness comes from Fraser Nelson:

The DUP could of course take the government's £200 million and still vote with the Tories. But it would be mad to close the door to further bribes. There are two more years to go of Brown and, the way things are going, the DUP may be starting a long and fruitful relationship and may be able to negotiate control of Western Scotland.

Frankly, they're welcome to it. Carting Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire off to Ulster would transform the prospects of any (albeit rump) independent Scotland. Hell, it could be a bonny place if it were freed of those twin millstones...

(Surprise! The DUP are voting with the government. The Ayes 315, the Noes 306. Government majority is 9. It was the DUP wot won it for Brown.)

The Importance of Being Stubborn

Charles Crawford, formerly Our Man in Warsaw, Sarajevo and Belgrade, thinks we should have told the Saudis to hop off and let the BAE corruption trial proceed. Not because anti-corruption investigations are good in themselves but because it would have been a demonstration of toughness. In the longer term, then, the national interest would have been better served by exposing the Saudis. But that's not our style...

The Russians too are outstanding negotiators, but in a different sense. They are taught negotiating technique in a way which is quite foreign to British and European methods.

Russian diplomats' First Rule of Negotiating is simple and profound: "Never move position, even when you agree with someone, without trying to extract something first."

This attitude gives them all sorts of advantages. Above all they usually convey the impression (a) that they are tough, and (b) that they move only on their terms. Plus they come over as (c) ready to take considerable pain in defending their principles, while (d) being ready, nay keen, to hit you harder (and if possible below the belt) than you hit them.

Which is why Russian diplomats are rarely kidnapped or humiliated. Even the dimmest terrorist out there knows that if he does something bad to the Russians, they will not hesitate to something Very Bad, and preferably very personal, to him - and his family.

Our British problem is that we (maybe especially in the FCO?) in a baffling post-modern way are increasingly uncomfortable if not embarrassed with any talk of 'power' (theirs or ours). We seem to be drifting into a hazy miasma of collective ineffectualness. Psychological and practical 'safety' is all. Confrontation necessarily is aggressive (and therefore bad). Winning is undesirable if it means someone loses.

It is hard to know where all this rubbish comes from explicitly. Part of it is the fact that at the national level we find ourselves sucked in to a 'European' style of negotiating, a restless but incoherent striving for 'middle ground'. The default instinct when confronted with a new demand is not to say loudly "get lost", but rather to sigh "oh dear, they want something again - what might we offer them this time?"

In short, we can come across not as Powerfully Purposeful, but Lamely Malleable. When in fact we aren't, or at least do not need to be.

Indeed. I'd also suggest that this is what happened in Northern Ireland too. London wanted a deal so badly that, in the end, the actual details of an agreement were less important than the existence of a piece of paper everyone could sign. Knowing this, Sinn Fein and the IRA had an enormous advantage in the negotiating process (boosted by the awareness that Washington would bat for the "Green" side of the argument every time). When the Republicans said "No" they were rewarded, when Unionists pointed out their concerns London was likely to see them as an obstacle to be overcome. In the end, the most unreasonable people in the room did best while the reasonable parties were eclipsed.

Hillary Surrenders on Ulster

Damnit. I'd enjoyed working up a good lather of indignation and righteous fury over Hillary Clinton's claim, repeated ad nauseam, to have played an "instrumental" role in the Northern Irish "peace process" (see several posts collected here, for instance). And now she's gone and spoiled it by, rather strikingly, walking back from her preposterous claims. As Toby Harnden reports:

Hillary Clinton has just issued a bland statement marking the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. In it, she salutes “the brave and tireless efforts of the parties” and notes that “the real credit for peace can only go to the brave people of Northern Ireland”.

She adds that “helping to advance the peace process and to achieve the Good Friday Agreement is one of my husband’s proudest accomplishments as President”. Of her own contribution, which she has previously inflated beyond the point of credibility, she says merely: “And I too am proud to have played a role in that effort.” So she’s toned down the blarney considerably – a victory for press scrutiny and common sense. Let’s see how long it lasts.

Why does Hillary Clinton want to spoil my enjoyment by being so (comparatively) reasonable all of a sudden?

Hillary of Belfast (Again)

Gosh, from this remarkable exchange with Jamie Rubin you could almost be forgiven for thinking that Hillary Clinton had more to do with the Northern Irish "peace process" than, hmmm, David Trimble. As Toby Harnden relates:

You can watch the video here. The relevant part starts about 5 minutes and 30 seconds in. Andrea Mitchell is asking him why Hillary Clinton appears to be exaggerating her role, which the former First Lady recently described as “instrumental”. He pulls out a piece of paper and reads a quotation from the late Mo Mowlam, former Northern Ireland Secretary, about Hillary helping to bring about an economic boom.

Mitchell: “As you know, there are others, like David Trimble, who disagree.”

Rubin: “I’ve met David Trimble. And he’s pretty much the only one. He’s a Protestant, they traditionally go with the Conservatives. I think we have a John Hume, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who said…”

Mitchell: “It was David Trimble who shared in that prize, Jamie.”

Rubin: “Right, and I know these people. I’ve been living over there. David Trimble is a crankpot and what he said about her was demeaning. He said, ‘Oh well, maybe she accompanied her husband on a couple of trips’. As a woman, Andrea, I would think you would recognise when somebody is trying to demean the activities of a woman. She was an important First Lady in foreign policy. I know. I was in that administration and we understood she was not serving tea and cookies, she played a significant role.”

Chris Dillow is spot on:

Everyone's mocked Hillary for her "mis-speaking." Only Bryan Appleyard, however, has come close to diagnosing the underlying illness. Her narcissism, he says, has caused her to elevate the survival and propagation of her self-image above all other values, such as a respect for reality.
In this sense, Hillary is a good Nietzschean. So-called "truth", he said, is just "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically" in the service of the pursuit of power."

On the other hand, perhaps Obama is the real Nietzschean? (Thanks to reader SG for the spot).

A Scots-Irish candidate for a Scots-Irish people?

Megan McArdle is surely right that Jamie Kirchik's prediction that Massachusetts may vote Republican this November seems, shall we say, implausible. Kirchik suggests that:

a Scots-Irish war veteran as the Republican nominee complicates predictions about whom Kennedy Country will support come November.

Well, up to a point Lord Copper. As Megan says, "Irish" America is largely catholic, whereas the descendants of the Scots-Irish, er, are not. More to the point, not many of them live in New England. The Scots-Irish constituency, to the extent is still exists, is found in Tennessee, southern Virginia and the Carolinas.

Still, in pointing out Kirchik's mistake, Megan commits one of her own. It wasn't Iain Paisley who popularised the oft-misquoted line that Northern Ireland be "protestant nation for a protestant people", it was James Craig (himself of fine Scots-Irish stock), the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. This, for sure, offends modern sensiblities but ought to be remembered in the context of its time. To wit, an era in which Eamon de Valera insisted upon the virulently Roman Catholic nature of the Free State to the south. As Craig told the House of Commons in 1934:

The hon. Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State. It would be rather interesting for historians of the future to compare a Catholic State launched in the South with a Protestant State launched in the North and to see which gets on the better and prospers the more. It is most interesting for me at the moment to watch how they are progressing. I am doing my best always to top the bill and to be ahead of the South.

Until the last 20 years, of course, Ulster (or, rather, the six counties of Nothern Ireland) was "ahead of the South" in economic terms at least. This does not, for sure, justify or exonerate the discrimination faced by catholics in the north, but it might be remembered that protestants faced suspicion and discrimination of their own in the south (though not, admittedly, on the scale of that endured by catholics in the north). Still, the decline in the protestant population south of the border from 1922-45 is not simply a matter of birth-rate politics.

Anyway, the American politician most closely associated with the Scots-Irish is Senator Jim Webb. Heck, he did write the book* on the subject. Webb, of course, is sometimes mentioned as a potential Vice-Presidential** pick for the Democratic party and to the extent that the Scots-Irish constituency exists - though it's more a matter of sentiment and attitude than strict bloodlines these days - Webb's appeal to the white working class in Appalachia might be useful to Barack Obama.

*Well-worth reading. Its account of British and Irish history is overly simplistic and Webb's vision is somewhat corrupted by an impossible romanticism, but it's a splendid, even stirring, read. To wit:

Standing on the mountain, I worry that when this generation dies, the memory of those who went before me will be lost just as completely, buried under the avalanche of stories that have on occasion ridiculed my people and trivialised their journey. They came with nothing, and for a complicated set of reasons, many of them still have nothing. The slurs stick to me, standing on these graves. Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.

This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture. Its bloodlines have flowed in the veins of at least a dozen presidents, and in many of our greatest soldiers. It created and still perpetuates the most distinctly American form of music. It is imbued with a unique and unforgiving code of personal honor, less ritualized but every bit as powerful as the samurai code. Its legacy is broad, in many ways defining the attitudes and values of the military, of working-class America, and even of the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself.

**I have my own doubts about this, mind you. Webb is not a natural campaigner, though this has the benefit of demonstrating a natural, awkward cussedness that, whatever else it may be, is, in the buzzword of the day, authentic. But I doubt that Webb is a "team-player" and suspect he'd be more useful to the Democratic party in the Senate than the Vice-President's office.

For lots more on Webb and McCain I can't recommend Robert Timberg's The Nightingale's Song highly enough.

Shamrockery: Hillary's Travesty

Lord knows there are plenty of reasons to be appalled by Hillary Clinton, but her claim to have been "instrumental" (I kid you not) in bringing "peace" to Northern Ireland is (for me) the single most enraging element of her campaign. Of course this is monstrous nonsense but, alas, it seems to be being treated with undue respect by the American media. Take for instance this remarkable exchange between Terry McAuliffe and a CNN anchor on March 4th:

ROBERTS:What are those life experiences that she has that would make her more qualified?

MCAULIFFE: Well, sure, John. First of all, being first lady, she traveled over 80 countries, met with world leaders. As you know, she worked on opening the borders in the Balkans. I was just at a huge event getting ready for St. Patty's Day in Cleveland, Ohio, an Irish-American event for Hillary Clinton. We would not have peace today had it not for Hillary's hard work in Northern Ireland...

     ROBERTS:  Right.  But... 

     MCAULIFFE:  ...working with her husband. 

     ROBERTS:  But what crisis has she dealt with? 

MCAULIFFE: John, it's the whole scope of these events and I'm talking about working in Northern Ireland. It's going to China in front of the world leaders in China and saying to them, you're violating human rights. You are -- you are violating women's rights. These are big issues that affect people. She has taken on tough challenges. Those are life experiences. She's been all over the world.

 

You will note, won't you, how Roberts doesn't even bother challenging McAuliffe's preposterous suggestion that there'd have been no peace process without the efforts of Hillary Rodham Clinton?

You might dismiss McAuliffe as a freelance blowhard, but as  Toby Harnden points out, Hillary is also indulging in some quasi-megalomaniac fantasy:

After Nobel peace prize winner David Trimble’s gentle admonition via my story last week that inflating her role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland was a “wee bit silly”, one might have thought she’d rein herself in a touch. Not a bit of it – there she was today going further than ever before by saying on NPR that she played an “instrumental” role.

You can hear the audio here by clicking on “listen now” – go to the five-minute point (just after the cackle). She abandons her carefully-calibrated previous formulation of having “helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland” (technically, by that measure, several million people might qualify) in favour of: “I wasn't sitting at the negotiating table but the role I played was instrumental.”

A highly charitable interpretation of Clinton's remarks would suggest that she was as instrumental to the process as a Second Violin is to an orchestra. They're useful things, for sure, but it doesn't matter very much if one of them is missing. In other words, their value is collective, not individual. No-one would have missed Hillary had she never set foot upon Ulster soil, but she did at least stick to the tune and kept out of the way.

Her "role" such as it was, consisted entirely of, as Time points out here, "hearing" the "voices" of women's groups who were, however justly or not, almost entirely irrelevant to the peace process. A cup of tea in Belfast is not quite the same as being "instrumental" to a peace process that had in any case been underway for years before the Clinton's ever first visited Northern Ireland.

As Toby says:

Give me 20 minutes and I could probably name 200 people who played a bigger role than Hillary.

Quite.

Hillary's Walter Mitty Fantasy

November I suggested that Hillary Clinton's own autobiography provides no evidence to support her on-the-trail assertions that she was a foreign policy player during her husband's administration:

The book is not a policy manifesto of course. But even making that allowance it is striking how much of Hillary's memoir is taken up with fluff - "I had given a lot of thought to how Chelsea and I should dress on the trip. We wanted to be comfortable, and under the sun's heat, I was glad for the hats and cotton clothes I had packed" - and how little is concerned with affairs of state...

Perhaps it's unfair to judge Hillary by the evidence published in a book she didn't write. Then again, it did appear under her name and judging from Living History there was lots of travel but precious little real policy. If that's an unfair conclusion then Hillary will, doubtless, tell us why and how and where this verdict is unwarranted.

In December last year I also argued that her claim to have been a significant "force for peace" in Northern Ireland is a preposterous fabrication. Still, since Bill Clinton is prone to exaggerate his own contribution to what we're still supposed to call the "Peace Process" it's scarcely a great surprise that he should also lie about his wife's role.

Happily Toby Harnden was in Belfast at the time the Clintons were supposedly spreading peace and prosperity and is thus in a good position to report that Hillary's claim that:

"I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland*,"

is, as you might expect, absurd. David Trimble, who is of course, in a good position to know, suggests Hillary is being "a wee bit silly" (ie, lying through her teeth) in saying this:

"I don’t know there was much she did apart from     accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around...She visited when things were happening, saw what     was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I     don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for     something is slightly different from being a principal player."

Quite so.

*For reasons best known to themselves, the Clintons are enlisting the support of the ghastly Peter King (himself, of course, an IRA apologist) to argue, contra the evidence, that Hillary was important. Toby blogs this intervention here:

"She was actively involved." [says King] "It was George Mitchell who was negotiating and Bill Clinton who was calling a lot of the shots but Hillary, first of all she had access to the President on I think it was three trips to Northern Ireland. She knew all of the players on a first-name basis….She was certainly more than just someone along for the ride. She spoke with some authority. I consider her to be a serious player. I say that as someone who supports John McCain and wants Hillary Clinton defeated in November. But fair is fair.”

He then spoke about a meeting about arms decommissioning in December 1998. “That was right after Trimble and Hume were given the Nobel Peace Prize. There was a big dinner in Washington for all the players in the peace process. I was just there in the audience and President Clinton was speaking. I got a notification that the President wanted to speak to me after the dinner and so I go behind the stage and there was a small room and when I went in the door there was President Clinton and Gerry Adams and Hillary Clinton and they were talking about decommissioning – that was still the issue, who would go first and how it would be done. Hillary was part of that conversation.”

By this "standard", of course, I also "helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland".

Why, at university in Dublin I organised meetings and debates at which Unionists and Nationalists could exchange their views and, for sure, learn more about one another! It's about "building trust" and "breaking down barriers" you see? And, lo, we invited Loyalists and Republicans too! And I also had conversations about "decommissioning" with General John de Chastelaine and David Ervine and Mitchell McLaughlin and David Trimble and so on and so on! Some of these men even came to dinner and insisted I call them by their first names too!

For more on this, see how a comedian named Sinbad destroys Hillary's claims to foreign policy expertise in the Balkans too.

"Appalling people doing appalling things"

Great column by Simon Jenkins in today's Guardian. The celebration of the "Cheeky Brothers" Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley has been nauseating. Now the old brute has gone and good riddance to him. Or at least so you might think. But no, instead you could have been forgiven for supposing that a national treasure is slipping from the scene. Jenkins is absolutely correct:

Why do rats float while good men sink? Readers may have exploded over the headline on this page yesterday. It read "A fascinating, gracious man", and crowned a eulogy on Northern Ireland's retiring first minister, Ian Paisley, written by his one-time bitterest foe, Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin/IRA.

Adams described Paisley as variously civilised, good-humoured, respectful, cordial and a man whom "I would like to know better". Funny that Adams, or at least his friends, spent much of their lives trying to kill him or his ilk. As for Paisley's role in inciting violence and tension, it "whetted my political appetite and radicalised a generation of young people like myself". It was almost a thank you. It was sickening...

Between them Adams and Paisley made Northern Ireland ungovernable and brought death, destruction and untold misery to tens of thousands of their countrymen. They offered no leadership towards compromise and undermined those who did by pandering to the baser instincts and fears of their supporters. They were the Taliban of Europe, operating in their equivalent of Tora Bora, the fields of South Armagh and the Orange Order halls of the Shankill. The death toll rose to 3,500.

Adams and his collaborator, Martin McGuinness, destroyed Hume's SDLP, and Paisley's histrionic fundamentalism destroyed Trimble's unionism. Any effort to drag the province into the 20th century was met with a flurry of kneecappings, bombings, murders and exile. These were appalling people doing appalling things, when good people were struggling to bring peace to a corner of a nation that boasted to the world that it was a sophisticated democracy.

For more on how we've taken defeat in Northern Ireland and called it victory, see several posts here.

[Hat-tip: Iain Martin]

McGuinness's less than surprising attitude to booze

James Forsyth says it is "deeply comic" for Martin McGuiness to complain:

“I am not a fan of East-Enders or Coronation Street but my wife and my children, particularly the girls, watch the programme. I am appalled at the drunkenness that is quite clear for everybody to see and all of that before the 9 o’clock watershed when children as young as 8, 9, 10 and 11 are watching. Now I regard that as irresponsible broadcasting and I think something should be done about it.”

Now of course, James is right to point out that Mr McGuiness's role in murdering countless civilians scarcely gives him the clout to act, in James' words, "a moral arbiter".

Perhaps so. But I couldn't help recalling all the hard-faced Republicans I used to meet at debates in Dublin. They were never much of a party crowd (the Unionists - at least those Unionists prepared to come to Dublin - were much more fun) and, in fact, I can't recall any of them accepting a drink, let alone cracking a joke. They were far too serious and stern-eyed for that sort of caper. No surprise: even in the mid-1990s Sinn Fein still though of itself as a revolutionary movement. The party's spokesmen all had the grim-eyed, humourless disposition characteristic of the zealot through the ages.

Then again, McGuinness's social conservatism is none too surprising either. In the first place, he belongs to a movement that sees precious little divide between the personal and the political; secondly he's an Ulsterman after all and an Ulsterman of a generation that could scarcely be considered libertine. For sure, the IRA's habit of knee-capping drug dealers was down to the organisation's desire to control organised crime for itself as well as arrogating to itself the right to be its own police force in the areas of Belfast it controlled, but there was also, it should be recognised, a moral element to it's punishment beatings as well. That might have been a secondary motivation but it was there to at least some extent in some of its activities.

Incidentally, the Times article James quotes is a useful example of how stories are trussed these days. It begins:

He has spent much of the past year in the company of an implacable public moraliser whose long career of saying no has included thunderous protests against everything from Irish flags to line-dancing.

But yesterday Belfast was asking itself whether Martin McGuinness has been spending too much time in the company of the Rev Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, after the former IRA leader condemned the “drunkenness” being depicted in television soap operas.

In a reproach of which his new boss would have been proud, Mr McGuinness said: “I have to say, I am absolutely appalled at the level of concentration around the pub in the programmes.”

Was Belfast really "asking itself" this? It seems unlikely. No matter. The important thing is that it's just a bit of fun innit? Next:

Mr McGuinness’s comments, which came after a meeting of the British-Irish Council in Dublin at which representatives from all the administrations in the British Isles discussed measures to tackle drug and alcohol misuse among young people, led to speculation that the Sinn Fein MP for Mid Ulster is succumbing to the strict Presbyterian outlook of his famously outspoken boss at the Stormont power-sharing Assembly.

Oh really? No hint of speculation is cited in the article and, as the journalist surely knows, the idea of McGuinness "succumbing" to Presbyterianism is laughable. Indeed, the very next paragraph demolishes the entire premise of the "story":

Although Mr McGuiness’s [sic] comments provoked amusement in Belfast yesterday, nobody should really be surprised – at 57, he is still some distance behind Mr Paisley in age but is known for his teetotalism and strict Catholic upbringing. He is described as highly self-disciplined, and has a traditionalist Christian background that makes him paradoxically similar to Mr Paisley.

But of course, "Teetotal McGuinness deplores TV Boozing" isn't much of a "story" is it? Nor is "Christians Have Lots in Common." Then again, the way this piece is presented is another reminder that, for most Britons, Ulster remains something of a foreign country, even as it endures as a part of the United Kingdom.

 

 

Ulster Says Yes!

John McCain secures the Orange vote:

(Thanks to loyal pal RD.)

Clinton: My Wife's Part in Ulster's Downfall

Daniel Larison points out an extraordinary passage from Bill Clinton's appearance on The Charlie Rose Show on Friday. Bafflingly, Clinton seems to believe that the Northern Irish peace process qualifies his wife to be President:

Clinton:...The only way to overcome our differences is not basically to try to erase the past, it's to get used to working together. I mean it's kind of a metaphor for the Hillary argument. If you look at last Monday, the...

Charlie Rose: You are people are pushing me, so it's not my --

Bill Clinton: The new leaders of Northern Ireland came to Washington to see the president. They -- it represents a stunning change. I think everybody we met, right, stunning change in Northern Ireland.

Charlie Rose: It's unbelievable.

Bill Clinton: And they asked to see another person. They asked to see Hillary, because she played an independent role in their peace process when I was president, independent of me. Now who were these new leaders? Ian Paisley, who was a long time leader of their conservatives, and Martin McGuinness, who is one of the toughest guys in the Sinn Féin. They are the co-leaders of Northern Ireland. The Northern Irish didn't think that to turn the page, they had to throw out the people who had represented their respective points of view. They thought they were more likely to work together to effect positive change because of what they had done in the past....I like all these Democrats. I will support whoever gets nominated. I think we are fortunate in having people who want to turn the page and take a new direction. I think the relevant question from me is who would be the best president based on who has a proven record of making change in the lives of other people. Therefore, I think she would be the best president. But that is, to me, what it all comes down to. And if you think about the Northern Ireland deal, they didn't go out and find two guys that happened to be a Protestant, and happened to be a Catholic.

Well! Hillary certainly "played an independent role" in the Norther Irish "peace process" if by "independent role" you mean "position of no importance whatsoever". The idea that Hillary can claim any credit for whatever successes or progress there has been in Northern Ireland is preposterous. But only marginally more idiotic than the former President's apparent belief that he alone was responsible for the Good Friday Agreement. Since he's happy to exaggerate his useful, supplementary - but scarcely decisive - contribution presumably it is easy to similarly gild his wife's importance.

Secondly, Charlie Rose is right to say that what's happened in Northern Ireland is "unbelievable". It's just unbelievable in ways that I suspect neither Charlie Rose nor Bill Clinton will ever understand. It is indeed stunning that a DUP-Sinn Fein "partnership" at Stormont is hailed as a great achievement. To listen to Clinton's babble you would think that installing a government of bigots and terrorists is a good thing.

But of course it's actually evidence of the profound, dreadful failure of the peace process. Naturally, this means it must be called victory. Still, no matter what politicians in London, Dublin or Washington may say, installing Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness is a failure - a failure that may, perhaps, have been inevitable but that was, however unwittingly, aided and abetted by leaders in all three capitals.

Indeed, when the Downing Street Declaration or, years later, the Good Friday Agreement were signed, you had said that the result would be a Sinn-Fein & DUP administration in Belfast, everyone would, quite rightly have been horrified. Such an outcome would have been considered proof that the process had failed, not that it had succeeded.

Now, however, we are supposed to think differently and remember that we were wrong then and everything is fine and dandy now. After all, at every stage we'rereminded that an imperfect peace is better than a return to violence. Well, so it may be. But even if you accept that the Paisley-McGuinness alliance is preferable to some alternatives (a return to car bombs and snipers and all the rest of it) that doesn't mean it was preferable to all alternatives.

It didn't have to be this way. Now, of course, a settlement may have to involve talking with distasteful folk, including terrorists such as McGuinness (something more than Clinton's cheer "toughest guys in the Sinn Fein") and bigots such as Paisley (the "leader" of "their conservatives" [sic] largely because no-one thought it wise or sensible to support David Trimble and the OUP; preferring instead to assuage and sweet talk Sinn Fein at every step) but, as I say, this doesn't mean selling the store. Well before the end, however, the process had become more important than the result. In fact, the result didn't matter so long as the process itself continued.

The peace process was supposed to restore - or even, in some respects, create - Northern Irish civil society. Instead it ensured that it was, in the end, taken over by the very people that threatened or made impossible the idea of civil society itself. Truly, an unbelievable success.

Needless to say it would have been better had the Northern Irish people thrown out the buggers responsible for creating the chaos the peace process was supposed to end. Instead, for various reasons (not all of them unpredictable), the decent centre was weakened to pacify the indecent extremes.

So, anyway, Clinton's argument that his wife should be supported because she is the McGuinness/Paisley figure in this campaign is bizarre. Is she a terrorist or a bigot? Or both?  What does Bill know that we don't?

Belfast on the Euphrates?

Matt Yglesias sees walls going up in Baghdad and wonders if the US Army is using Northern Ireland as its template:

I believe this technique comes to the US Army's counterinsurgency theorists via Belfast, where I believe they have been effective in helping the British maintain a degree of order.

To some extent, this brings us back to the question of strategy. If tactics employed in Northern Ireland can be made to work in Iraq (and maybe they can) even though Iraq has ten times as many people as Northern Ireland does and even though Iraqis don't speak English and even though the sectarian violence in Iraq is undergirded by concrete fighting over valuable resources, then does this really seem like a wise strategic undertaking? It doesn't seem that way to me. It's been decades since "the Troubles," after all, and while Northern Ireland is now in a situation that there's reason to be optimistic about, you could imagine it all going to shit. All things considered, it seems like the British position there is one we ought to avoid getting ourselves stuck into. Emulating the UK's more successful tactics from that theater makes sense if we're going to adopt that kind of mission, but there mere fact that the tactics can maybe kinda sorta work if we give them a few dozen years is no reason to actually do it.

Well, it hasn't been decades since "The Troubles" but I know what Matt means: the worst of the killing did happen more than 25 years ago, before the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary settled in for the long haul. Over time the security forces were able to squeeze the paramilitaries tighter and tighter; the violence didn't end, of course, but Ulster settled in to what amounted to a vicious stalemate. Neither side could prevail militarily (at least, from the British perspective, not without catastrophic and counter-productive social and political consequences) and the poor province was reduced to living with what one Secretary of State coolly ackowledged was "an acceptable level of violence".

Still, to the extent that Northern Ireland (population of 1.7 million, 5,000 square miles) can be a useful example for security measures in Iraq (26 million, 170,000 square miles) one might say that the US army is now approximately where the UK was in the late-1970s. Cracking an insurgency is one thing, but it is only preparatory to the real task of reducing violence to a level in which some degree of political progress becomes possible. This took 20 years in Ulster (Sunningdale, Anglo-Irish Agreement, Downing Street Declaration, Good Friday Agreement) and even then the violence wasn't snuffed out entirely (also, government ended up in the hands of thugs and bigots - a price eventually deemed worth paying).

Does the US really have the stomach for that kind of patience? Equally, can it really deploy the best part of 100,000 troops in Iraq for another ten years?

Earlier this summer, the army released a very interesting overview of its experience in Northern Ireland. Its findings are, shall we say, sobering in the light of the Iraq experience. Among them:

...There was no insurgency in August 1969. The IRA was not a credible force and took no significant part in the events of that month.  For several reasons the IRA was allowed to develop into an effective insurgent organisation over the next two years. This suggests that the early stages of an apparent breakdown in social order – however it is described - are absolutely critical to the subsequent nature of a campaign. All subsequent decisions and actions, by all parties, are conditioned by these early events. Furthermore violence in the early stages creates bitterness, hatred and extreme views which can last for generations.  Looking at the events of the Troubles in retrospect, it is apparent that many of them could have been avoided or reduced in impact if effective measures had been taken early on; and that similar patterns can be seen in many situations elsewhere.

...The initial period after the arrival of a military force in a peace support or peace enforcement operation has been described as the ‘honeymoon period’.  That suggests that there is a period (variously given as 100 days or three months) in which to put things right. The term ‘honeymoon period’ is a misnomer.  It is not a honeymoon.  It is the most important phase of the campaign.   

...Security forces do not ‘win’ insurgency campaigns militarily; at best they can contain or suppress the level of violence and achieve a successful end-state.  They can thus reduce a situation to an ‘acceptable level of violence’ – a level at which normal social, political and economic activities can take place without intimidation. ‘Acceptable level of violence’ as a term should be used carefully since violence should have no place in a developed society. What is required is a level which the population can live with, and with which local police forces can cope.  Security forces should bring the level of violence down to the point at which dissidents believe they will not win through a primarily violent strategy and at which a political process can proceed without significant intimidation.  If possible, the situation should not be allowed to come to that stage.

...Without effective cultural understanding the security forces in any theatre cannot conduct a truly effective information campaign and arguably, therefore, an effective counter insurgency campaign.  Additionally many military activities may be flawed because the reaction of population cannot be properly predicted: there is a need both to gain intelligence and to understand local perceptions.7  This links to the idea that insurgency feeds off dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction is a sentiment based on perception.  Perception is framed by culture.

...The Manoeuvrist Approach generally stresses manoeuvre rather than attrition, whilst accepting that some destruction is inevitably required.20  Operation BANNER supports this approach. The massive and sustained attrition against PIRA in the mid-1970s did not destroy it, but drove it to reorganise and restructure.  The attritional aspect of ‘reassurance, deterrence and attrition’ in the 1980s had relatively
little effect on PIRA. Attrition did have other effects which reinforce key tenets of the Manoeuvrist Approach. The first is the shock effect of major strikes against PIRA. The second effect was that of shaping PIRA’s perceptions, that it would not win by the continuation of the armed struggle and that it was was losing some of its most experienced terrorists.

...Although the British Army has clearly benefited from the lessons it learned in Northern Ireland, not all of these were entirely new; many had been identified before 1969, but were then applied by a new generation of soldiers.  For example, the CO of the first unit to come under fire went to great lengths in his post-operational report to stress the need not to return fire until the firing point could be positively identified. As a result his battalion did not return fire until one hour and 40 minutes after the first round had been fired at it. Thus restraint in the use of force, and the discipline required to achieve it, were lessons from earlier conflicts.  Operation BANNER ensured that such lessons were learned, institutionalised and if necessary re-learned by the whole Army.

...The behaviour which the British Army displayed was a key factor.  The Israeli historian Martin van Creveld has said that the British Army’s self-discipline, and particularly restraint and forbearance in the face of grievous provocation, was a key factor. The Army rarely over-reacted. It did not respond with tanks on the streets.  It generally displayed humanity and humour, although during the early 1970s this was difficult to sustain and a desire to ‘sort the Micks out’ was often apparent. 

...Martin van Creveld has said that the British Army is unique in Northern Ireland in its success against an irregular force. It should be recognised that the Army did not ‘win’ in any recognisable way; rather it achieved its desired end-state, which allowed a political process to be established without unacceptable levels of intimidation. Security force operations suppressed the level of violence to a level which the population could live with, and with which the RUC and later the PSNI could cope. The violence was reduced to an extent which made it clear to the PIRA that they would not win through violence.  This is a major achievement, and one with which the security forces from all three Services, with the Army in the lead, should be entirely satisfied. It took a long time but, as van Creveld said, that success is unique. [emphasis added]