Daily Mail, October 21 2002

Listening to the Prime Minister on Northern Ireland is surely the nearest approximation to an out-of-body experience. On the podium is the Tony Blair who kow-tows to terrorists by granting them power while they point a gun at his head. But hovering directly above him is the Tony Blair who looks down upon himself and savages such a tactic as a farce that doesn’t work.

Mr Blair’s remarkable speech last week has been hailed as the moment of truth, the point at which the IRA was told unequivocally that the game was up. The IRA could no longer be half in, half out of the peace process, he said. It had to renounce violence altogether.

The Prime Minister was hardly short of provocation. The arrests of IRA men for helping Columbian terrorists and the break-in at Castlereagh police station were in turn all but eclipsed by the discovery of IRA espionage at Stormont, and the revelation that Mr Blair was known to the Provisionals as the ‘useful idiot’.

His new tough line also appeared to be shrewd politics. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who are said to be intoxicated by the celebrity of power, will surely bust a gut to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly to life.

Moreover, since September 11 the world has changed. With the glacial chill that has descended in Washington, IRA violence is now said to be unthinkable. And if this is really so, then surely Sinn Fein will no longer be able to play its manipulative games.

Yet it might do precisely that – making some apparently spectacular offer over decommissioning which will not amount to anything other than to cause disarray amongst the Unionists, as before. And the fear is that the British government will keel over, as before; because despite Blair’s new-found bullishness, his words were ambiguous.

For he still does not acknowledge that the peace process was fatally, endemically flawed. He does not accept that the very outrages he identified – the paramilitary punishment beatings, gangsterism and drug dealing – are the direct result of bringing terrorists into government under the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

On the contrary, he insisted that the government ‘will simply not countenance any path’ other than implementing that agreement. This is because the very concept of the ‘peace process’ has a kind of mythical quality for him. So in similar vein, while he supports action against both Iraq and Al Q’aeda, he thinks it vital to resume the ‘peace process’ in the Middle East by reopening negotiations between Israel and Yasser Arafat.

But appeasement of terror does not bring peace. True, in northern Ireland it has brought a protracted lull in IRA bombings – but it has created a violent ‘mafia’ state. And in the Middle East, it was the Oslo peace process which actually armed the Palestinian Authority and resulted in terrorism of such unprecedented ferocity that it destroyed the Israeli government promoting that process and brought Ariel Sharon to power instead.

Mr Blair’s appeasement plays into the terrorists’ hands because he makes two fundamental errors. The first is his failure to acknowledge that terrorism is violence as theatre. Its aim is to attract attention, to have a propaganda effect by manipulating public opinion.

To do so, it is crucial for terrorists to be taken seriously on their own terms as political fighters. So the importance of being included as potential statesmen in a ‘peace process’ cannot be overestimated. And the more this happens, the more terrorism is encouraged.

The second error is to see the cause of terror as oppression, poverty or thwarted national aspirations. As the American lawyer Alan Dershowitz says in his book Why Terrorism Works, this search for terror’s ‘root causes’ smacks simply of after-the-fact justification .

Sure, Northern Ireland’s Catholics suffered discrimination and worse by Protestants. But terror continued to escalate despite decades of reform which progressively dealt with these injustices. Sure, Palestinians are entitled to their own state if they wish to live in peace with Israel. But just such a ‘two-state solution’ was offered in 1948 and rejected by the Arab states which tried instead to destroy Israel, an attempt which has continued unabated through war and terrorism (and despite another such offer in 2000) ever since.

The cause of terror is the fact that terrorists know that it works – first as a means of attracting attention, and then as a route to power. Terrorism gave Sinn Fein its place in the Assembly. Terrorism gave Arafat his place in the Oslo accords.

Yet the terrorism they sponsor still endures. This is not because of oppression – after all, many, many people are oppressed and do not resort to terror – but because of ethnic hatred and tribalism.

The Palestinians are indoctrinated with an incendiary hatred of Jews through a torrent of medieval antisemitism pouring out of the Arab world. The Catholics in Northern Ireland back Gerry Adams not despite but because of his past as the IRA’s head man, because in conflicts based on tribal hatred people tend to back leaders who are cast in a heroic mould.

As ever, Tony Blair is facing two ways at once. In his speech, he damned those who from the beginning had identified the fundamental flaw in the peace process. These people had apparently undermined all those working for peace through their ‘malignant whisperings’.

And yet in the same speech Blair conceded the truth of these ‘whisperings’. For he actually conceded that the violence had given the terrorists negotiating leverage over the political process. The threat of violence, he declared, ‘no longer pushes the British government forward’ – thus revealing that it had previously done so. What an admission!

He conceded the force of the ‘malignant whispering’ that while the Irish wouldn’t allow Sinn Fein to be in government until the IRA gave up their activities, the British had forced the Unionists to share power with them with no such insistence.

He conceded also that it was grotesque for republicans to become police officers while maintaining an active paramilitary organisation outside the law. This only needed to be stated, he declared, to be seen as an absurdity. But who was it other than Tony Blair who brought about this absurdity?

Now the IRA has reportedly rejected his ‘unrealistic’ demand to renounce violence, although the ‘Real IRA’ is said to be split. But why should the terrorists take any notice, when in the next breath Blair declared that the government would do its best to carry on implementing the agreement ‘in any event’?

In other words, the IRA might put its next shipment of arms on video and play it on a screen in Trafalgar Square, and the appeasement process would still sail on regardless.

As Alan Dershowitz says, the only way to deal with terrorists is to place them beyond the pale of negotiation. The message has to be unequivocal – that they have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Despite his gung-ho image, our Prime Minister has dismayingly managed to convey precisely the opposite, as he floats high above his body on windy currents of fantasy and delusion.

Posted by admin at October 21, 2002