John O'Sullivan, of the National Review and the Hudson Institute, had an op-ed in the NY Post yesterday about the Northern Ireland power-sharing agreement. It's not a bad piece on the whole (by the standards of the NY Post, anyway), but I think it's instructive to note the point where O'Sullivan goes a bit strange, because the ditch he steers into is filled with lots of crashed conservative arguments about the best ways to handle terrorism.
First, O'Sullivan concedes that this agreement is likely to be more lasting in its effects than the far more delicate agreements of the 1990s:
Both the DUP and Sinn Fein - the two largest parties in the Northern
Ireland Assembly - agreed to establish a joint power-sharing executive
in six weeks time at the Stormont parliament.
And this final
stage of the "peace process" was rooted firmly in real factors that are
unlikely to change. Both parties want to get their bottoms in
ministerial limos and their hands on large salaries (plus expenses).
London and Dublin played tough and clever - threatening Paisley with
joint rule of Ulster by both governments and threatening everyone with
a highly unpopular policy of charging for water unless Paisley and
Adams got together.
And, after six years of uneasy peace, no
one wants to return to the terror war - ordinary people don't want to
be bombed; the terrorists don't want to return to life on the run and
in prison.
Well, no, they don't. So what's the problem? (Aside from the "six years of uneasy peace" part; the previous power-sharing deal was suspended in 2002; I can't figure O'Sullivan's chronology here.) O'Sullivan argues that that the problem is that if there is "cause for relief," there is none for "celebration." First, this is because a lot of people were killed since 1969. (OK...) Second, "the corpses of moderate Unionism and constitutional Irish nationalism also litter the field": the more moderate and formerly more electorally successful parties -- the unionist UUP and the nationalist SDLP -- have been eclipsed by Ian Paisley's DUP and Gerry Adams' Sinn Fein. Third, it would seem that the Bad Guys have won: the unpleasant demagogic Paisley, and Adams and Martin MacGuinness, who "were directly responsible for many murders as members of the IRA's Army Council." (True enough.) Also, O'Sullivan calls Tony Blair a "perp" (an interesting word choice), since
In the long "peace process," Blair leaned over backward to appease
Sinn Fein-IRA at the expense of the moderate democratic parties - as
Peter Mandelson, Blair's close ally and a former Northern Ireland
Secretary, revealed only days ago.
This bias was needless,
because the IRA was militarily on the ropes.
The Triumph of the Extremists for O'Sullivan may have Serious Consequences:
the working-class ghettoes on both sides will now be effectively
governed by local mafias rooted in the IRA and Protestant
paramilitaries. The police are to be supervised by boards on which
"former terrorists" can serve. And the power-sharing rules pretty much
guarantee Sinn Fein and Paisley prolonged control.
That's bad
news for southern Ireland, where the "Shinners" are a growing force.
Sinn Fein is the richest party in Ireland and maybe Europe. Financed by
overseas (mainly American) donations, its mafia rackets, legal
investments across Europe and, not least, bank robberies, it can afford
constituency services and media propaganda beyond the means of the
Irish Republic's democratic parties. Now it will have the
respectability and influence of its governmental role in Ulster.
OK. Well, for me, I don't see how any of this really outweighs the simple fact that as O'Sullivan says, people aren't "being bombed to hell indefinitely." My general rule of thumb for analyzing the value of any sort of policy is, "is it likely to produce fewer corpses than the alternatives?" Fewer dead people is a policy outcome hardly to be sneezed at, not least because when bodies are piling up, it's not really possible to achieve very many positive policy results of any kind at all. Not that O'Sullivan diminishes the value of the fact that the political and sectarian violence may now finally be over. The point is, though, the qualifications that are the whole point of his article are misguided.
The fate of the moderate parties and of Nobel Prize winners Trimble & Hume is I suppose to be lamented, but the hard fact is that they ultimately weren't able to deliver the peace. This may sound simplistic, but it's an often overlooked reality, that if you want peace, you need to convince the people who are actually fighting not to fight anymore.
Only "extremists" can create peace, by ceasing to fight, and, more significantly, ceasing to want to fight. Otherwise, they'll keep fighting. And in a situation like NI with its complex historical and social dynamics, speaking of "military victory" over the IRA as a reason for Tony Blair to not "appease" Sinn Fein... well, military victories can be overrated, you know. While yes, the IRA's capacity to cause trouble was significantly reduced by the mid-1990s, please let's remember how much damage a determined group or even individual can do in this day and age with some pretty crude tools. The "peace process," as strange and infuriating as it often seemed, has by and large had the effect of slowly transforming the primary forum for conflict in NI from physical force to electoral politics.
The real success will be in the evolution of the expectations of the communities in which these "extremist" parties are based. If they become convinced on a long term basis of the legitimacy of elections and all the other mechanisms of expressing political and cultural desires and grievances normal to an advanced western democratic state, and of the illegitimacy of violence... then there will be peace. If they aren't, then there won't, no matter what the military condition may be of the paramilitary organizations. And on this point it is worth stressing that Sinn Fein and the DUP won elections. It's a pitfall of democracy that perhaps even more than half of the time people whom we detest win elections, but you know, like it or lump it. It's the survival of the process that matters, no?
Because when the process is healthy, it's hard for a major political party to do things like get funding by running bank-robbing mafias. (I'm curious as to the basis for O'Sullivan's information about the nature of Sinn Fein's funding, by the way. I know about the bank-robbing stuff, but the richest political party in Europe? I'd not heard that. And I'm skeptical of the claims about American donations leading inevitably to SF successes; such money will now be very closely scrutinized and I'd imagine will eventually start to diminish as time goes on. *edited here for clarity*)
All of which brings us to O'Sullivan's warnings about the potential takeover of the Republic by militant "Shinners." Because these warnings are silly. The south has historically faced far graver threats from milatarist factions than anything now in the offing. The "Army Mutiny"? The assassination of Kevin O'Higgins? The potential for Nazi-IRA collaboration in WWII? Besides that, Gerry Adams taking over the Dail... sorry, don't see it. Not in this lifetime. And anyway, if it did happen, it would certainly not be with the Armalite, but with the ballot box: and then who's to complain? Either you're committed to democracy or you aren't, and if you are, you have to take the risk that your enemies might win.
And this is where O'Sullivan (a former "special adviser" to Margaret Thatcher, you'll be surprised to learn) takes the conservative turn into the ditch. If you're really a proponent of spreading democracy and of spreading peace, you have to be ready to sacrifice your own political and even strategic ambitions. To take a wacky example, I can picture a democratic and largely peaceful Iraq... that votes in a valid election to ally itself with Iran. I don't think this was the neocon vision of the invasion, though. And that's a contradiction and thus a primary reason the war has been such a fuckup: a liberatory occupation makes no sense and cannot be achieved.
It's also why, say, a Thatcherite approach to the problem of terrorism never quite worked.
