Why are Trimble and Duncan Smith playing with fire in Northern Ireland, asks Pat Stack
Wars on things, be they drugs, crime or terrorism, are unfalteringly unsuccessful in their stated aims but always give succour to the more unpleasant political forces.
The current war is claiming many lives, and is producing opportunist bile and vitriol from some of the nastier 'usual suspects'. We have had Thatcher's small minded bigotry married to Berlusconi's xenophobia. We have witnessed the war criminal Sharon and the sabre-rattling Putin both using the 'anti-terrorist war' to strengthen their own state terrorism.
Meanwhile closer to home we have witnessed that devout anti-terrorist David Trimble and that king of charisma Iain Duncan Smith trying to use the opportunity to further the cause of smashing the peace process in Northern Ireland. That they can use it in such a way exposes the whole notion of a war on terrorism.
Of course the methods people use have a bearing on your attitude to them. Nevertheless, the underlying cause must surely have an even greater one. Had Bin Laden, or whoever, ploughed planes into the World Trade Centre 20 years ago, I have no doubt that PW Botha would be signing up to the 'anti-terrorist war'. With the shrill voice of Thatcher behind him, he would have demanded a 'consistency' in opposition to terrorism, which would have asked the world to turn a blind eye to the state terror of his own regime.
So it is with Sharon and so it would be for Trimble and Duncan Smith if they actually ran anything. As they don't, they have instead chosen to try and run the peace process into the ground.
Theirs is surely the strangest war on terrorism, though. For while one might argue (rightly) that the logic of Bush and Blair's war is to create a next generation of terrorists, Trimble and Duncan Smith go one step further. They are seemingly intent on bringing back to arms a generation of 'terrorists' who have, to all intents and purposes, abandoned arms.
The Provisional IRA for the best part of 30 years waged an armed struggle against a corrupt sectarian state, military occupation, and partition of their country. It subsequently laid down its arms and has allowed them to remain silent for three and more years despite having fallen well short of its stated aims. It has put those arms in dumps and has now sealed at least some of those dumps. Its political leaders have been single-mindedly following a process of accommodation with a state it abhors. It has resisted provocation from Loyalist paramilitaries and sectarian marchers, from the lickspittle Trimble and his bigoted backwoodsmen. and finally from the likes of Blair, Mandelson and Reid, who have seemed only too keen to march to the Orange tune. Recently the IRA has watched Catholic schoolchildren face the fury of loyalist henchmen and sectarian mobs without so much as firing a shot.
Ah, but we have a war on terrorism, so let's just tar the IRA with a brush and be done with it. At the height of its struggle we were never asked to examine its cause, just condemn its methods--now we are asked to ignore its present and remember only its past.
We are asked to do so by one man (Trimble) who himself has a very shady past record, involving some very unsavoury bedfellows, and by another (Duncan Smith) who was a professional soldier. What is more, we are being asked to remember that past as one of violent infamy by those who act as cheerleaders for present day carnage.
That the IRA inflicted suffering on innocent people is undoubtedly true. It is, however, also true that this was rarely the IRA's aim. When you play with bombs, horrific botch-ups will take place, leaving human tragedy in their wake. Nevertheless it was the policy and practice of the IRA to issue warnings and allow for people to be cleared from the danger area.
Those who crashed planes into the World Trade Centre did not provide the innocent with such an opportunity. In this it has been argued they were uniquely uncivilised. Not so. The British in Dresden, the Americans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and again in Vietnam, butchered the innocent without chance of escape, just as the US and British forces do in Afghanistan today.
None of this matters a jot to our two intrepid heroes who, having spent years dismissing Republicans as 'men of violence', now seem genuinely distraught that the violence is over. They cannot defend a return to the sectarian state. They can no longer merely sideline the Catholic population. They can no longer arm their own militias without opposition and can no longer, with any hope of being taken seriously, denounce 'popish plots'. All they had left was a mantra against violence. That has been taken from them, and so they wail at the wake of their own impotence.
Now the violence resides overwhelmingly within their own 'loyal ranks' and they are left looking like a group of masochists at an S&M party bemoaning the failure of the sadists to bring along their whips. It is a truly strange sight, and would even be a funny one were it not for the potential tragedy their posturing could cause. For Trimble may be an insignificant Orange pip and Duncan Smith the final piece of proof needed to show that the lunatics have truly taken over the Tory asylum, but they play with the fire of instability of the Northern Irish peace process.
For there are clearly Loyalists who are now well on their way back to full sectarian bloodshed mode. There must also be Republicans who ask themselves if, having bent over backwards for little in return bar rebuff and abuse, the ceasefire is really sustainable. I suspect the overwhelming voice of the community they represent think it is, but when did Trimble or Duncan Smith ever give a damn about them?
War on terrorism? I think not.