You'll forgive me for ignoring the Ground Zero Mosque nonsense, which has evolved into an even dumber and loonier fake controversy than could have been imagined from a bunch of bullshit essentially invented by Pamela Gellar, proud exhibitor of the Vodka Tit (fake boobs filled with Smirnoff, perforated in manner of juice box or similar, for Those Special Times, namely, Tuesday, and six other likewise regularly occurring events). If it's still this stupid tomorrow I'll weigh in more directly. Promise. But Christ is it stupid...
In the meantime, in not entirely unrelated events (I'll get to it), glum news from the North of Ireland.
A car bomb exploded early Tuesday in front of a police station in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, but there were no injuries, police said.
Police later said it was a 200-pound bomb. They had received a warning that it would explode in 45 minutes, but it went off in about half that time, police said.
If officers hadn't moved in quickly to evacuate those in the immediate area, they said, the bomb would have caused deaths.
The blast happened after two men, one of whom had a gun, hijacked a taxi in the early hours of the morning and placed an object inside the vehicle, the Police Service of Northern Ireland said. They told the driver to head toward the Strand Road Police Station....
A series of such attacks has been reported in Northern Ireland this year, but none has caused serious injuries. The attacks are often blamed on dissidents who oppose the 1998 Good Friday peace settlement.
Well, they're blamed for it, because they're doing it.
It is exceedingly unlikely that these splinter groups of splinter groups, who if history is any guide, are very probably going to splinter over some ridiculous point of ideological orthodoxy or other, are going to prove themselves able to change the Direction of Irish History. They are certain to remind everyone of the bad old days, is about all. But this they do fairly effectively, especially in certain key historical areas.
Hotel manager Ann Carragher can no longer hide from her guests the violence taking place on her doorstep in south Armagh, the part of Northern Ireland more famous for terrorists than tourists.
Dissident republicans exploded a roadside bomb last month close to her Cross Square Hotel in the town of Crossmaglen. The police station less than 200 yards away has been raked with gunfire twice this year.
“The last time we had people staying, there was gunfire,” said Carragher, whose family opened the hotel in 2006. “They asked ‘What was that?’ and we said we never heard anything. There was no point panicking them.”
Gun attacks by dissidents rose 54 percent to 79 in the 12 months through May, according to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The violence has rekindled memories of the 30-year period known as the Troubles, when 115 British soldiers were killed in south Armagh, the area around Crossmaglen, according to a book called “Bandit Country” by journalist Toby Harnden.
“People probably think it’s a strange place to put a hotel, but we thought tourism would pick up a bit round this area with the peace process,” Carragher said.
Crossmaglen. A tourist hotel in Crossmaglen. I wish them all the luck in the world, sincerely, and I should like to visit.
I suppose though that there is a Cheerful Silver Lining. The dead-enders have not managed to kill anyone yet, much less have managed to perpetrate any spectacular loss of life. The threat they pose as far as killings go is probably mostly to themselves & their peculiar own goals, thus scoring own goals (and then own gaols); or else, they will harm innocents. They have almost no chance of even touching the security forces or the Brits. Those, I doubt they'll ever be able to impact so as to cause any serious Change of Course in regards to the Republic, the UK, or the structures of the NI government (whatever the hell we're calling that shit now).
But then that just goes to show how exceedingly hard it is in a modern Western democracy to obtain the kind of destructive firepower you'd need to pose anything beyond a nuisance-level threat to the overall social order, once that has been at least sort of achieved.
To sort of torque this to an American context, the good news is we're all as far as life and limb goes highly safe. Never say never, but as the Times Square fuckup bombing shows us, even in our very open society, there are significant hurdles in the way of anyone wanting to cause major mayhem.
Which is sort of the lesson of South Armagh. Utter ideological instrangience is pretty much impossible to safely handle; it is possible perhaps to contain it, but it is always dangerous. Look, South Armagh is in Western Fucking Europe, and on a one-to-one basis, everyone there from any particular class or viewpoint is probably at least as smart and thoughtful as you are. Or at least shares most of your assumptions, more to the point.
Of course, extrapolating to, say, Iraq, there was never any chance that any "peace" there would not also mean "decades of daily terrorism considered ho-hum that if it happened in the West would be Big Shit News"? There is nothing that can be done about this. If the US invasion of Iraq was intended to instill in the liberated/conquered certain Western notions of Fair Play and So Forth... well, that didn't work.
All of which suggests that if we're serious about these Western Values influencing others, maybe we'd be better off displaying them, as opposed to, well, acting like the GOP or Joe Lieberman, and shitheadedly proving correct the crazies in places where we cannot possibly have any significant impact through force.
That the last administration spit on the "law enforcement model" said everything. That this one is silent on the issue says too much.