Tony Blankley in the Washington Times, reflecting with concern on the hint dropped by the Bush administration that it might start regarding the terrorist army Hezbollah as having some kind of legitimate credentials, makes the salient point that treating with terrorists in the interests of 'long-term stability' -- the rationale given by the British government for dealing with Sinn Fein/IRA -- is always to sup with the Devil:

'"Long-term stability" is the illusive pot of gold. The rainbow is the gorgeous vision of dealing separately with the political and military arms of a terrorist organization — in the expectation that the political arm will grow, while the military arm will wither. Unfortunately, both arms are connected to the same body, which is governed by the same brain. And it is the brain of a killer. But because well-organized terrorists are so difficult to defeat, it is hard to resist chasing down the chimera of a morally divisible terrorist organization. So now, apparently, Mr. Bush is entering the chase for the illusive divisible Hezbollah.'

Just how lethal this chimera is was bitterly laid out today in the Daily Telegraph by Seamus Mallon, the former leader of Northern Ireland's democratic nationalist party, the SDLP. AS he says, the outcome of Tony Blair's grotesque appeasement of the IRA has been to wipe out the middle ground of Northern Ireland politics altogether, ceding the political arena to Sinn Fein/IRA and the militant loyalist party, the DUP. This unhappy outcome, says Mallon, was the direct result of the 'duplicity' of Mr Blair and the Irish Prime minister, Bertie Ahern:

'Mr Mallon accused the governments of acquiescing to republican demands to keep the IRA on ceasefire."They catered for the latest begging bowl," he said. "If you look at all the side deals, the lesson Sinn Fein got from Blair and Bertie Ahern was the more often you ask, the more often you get." Sinn Fein "damn well near lived in Downing Street", giving the electorate the message that "these are the people we should support because they are the people doing the deals". By comparison, on one occasion the SDLP delegation was actually left standing outside the Downing Street door. He believes there was no necessity to appease Sinn Fein because, after its 1994 ceasefire, the IRA was already in from the cold after visiting the White House, Downing Street, Dublin and "everything but the bloody crib".'

As I have observed before, 'peace processes' invariably become ends in themselves, thus giving the illusion of a transition to peace and democracy when in fact, the reality on the ground in Northern Ireland has been the creation of a kind of paramilitary mafia state -- all because the fundamental falsehood of the premise of the 'peace process', that the IRA had renounced the Armalite for the ballot-box, could not be admitted without terminating the process itself. This moral squalour, unmasked as a result of, first, the Irish government worm finally turning in the wake of the Belfast bank heist and then the courageous stand taken by the sisters and fiancee of the butchered Robert McCartney in exposing the Sinn Fein chimera for the lie that it is, occasioned a coruscating piece by Kevin Myers in last weekend's Sunday Telegraph.

As he said, throughout the years of the 'peace process' violence in Northern Ireland has been turned on and off at will, safe in the certainty that both British and Irish governments would ignore it all. The old Royal Ulster Constabulary was dismantled and its Special Branch destroyed, to be replaced by gun law, extortion and drug-running on the streets as the paramilitaries turned to organised crime and amassed a fortune with which to subvert the politics of Ireland. As Myers savagely observed:

'You cannot civilise or tame Sinn Fein-IRA. It is not possible. For bred in their bone and blood is a uniquely barbaric ethos. Of all European political parties, perhaps only the Nazis so successfully wove tribal myth, ancient heroes, victimhood, violence and utter immunity from civil and criminal law into an integral part of their identity. The peace process didn't draw the Sinn Fein movement away from these defining toxins: quite the reverse. In the agreeable culture of appeasement, the political antibodies that should have been combating the spread of the republican virus failed to respond.

'So, far from being banned from the airwaves, republicans inhabited them almost full-time, and the Sinn Fein malignancy spread through nationalist Ireland, north and south of the border. In the past decade, the political map of Ireland has been utterly transformed, and for thousands of young people across the island, Sinn Fein is the future. Thus, reassured by the governments of Dublin and London that separate rules applied to them, IRA men felt free to butcher poor Robert McCartney, confident they could get away with it. And indeed they would have done but for the five McCartney sisters who in their resolution were more than a match for the IRA. Mesmerised by such principled opposition, of a kind it that it had never met before, it made the public announcement that it had offered to shoot the murderers of their brother Robert. Thus spoke the authentic, visceral voice of Irish republicanism, finally and no longer emptily miming the meaningless patois of democracy.'

This murderous mime has now been exposed in Northern Ireland for what it is. But the same British Prime Minister who sank his moral prestige into this most compromised of deals is trying his hardest to repeat precisely the same kind of exercise in the Middle East -- where the tacit encouragement he has thereby given to Palestinian terror has without doubt contributed to the carnage in Israel. President Bush has to be extremely careful not to be sucked into the same unprincipled illusion.