Raining On Blair's St Paddy Day Parade

John F. Cullinan compares Ireland today with Sicily of yore:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed of Jimmy Carter that being “unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, he has essentially adopted our enemies’ view of the world.” That in a nutshell is the besetting flaw of the British and Irish governments’ whole handling of the Good Friday Agreement and its implementation. Their error, which far exceeds granting moral equivalence to terrorists, was to treat Sinn Fein/IRA as the sole indispensable party throughout the peace process. “Sinn Fein holds the key to peace,” said Tony Blair. By appeasing the republicans at practically every turn, the two governments empowered the extremes at the expense of the moderates. The entirely predictable result was the political collapse of moderate nationalism and moderate unionism. Asked why his government repeatedly undercut the moderates, one party leader was reported advised by Tony Blair: “You have no guns.”

Indeed, this political — and moral — failure is clearest in the matter of guns. Every effort was made to avoid any hint of surrender and submission in the agreed handover of all paramilitary weapons to an international body. A deliberately neutral term — “decommissioning” — was applied to the process of “putting arms beyond use” in hopes of bypassing the ancient quarrel over who won and who lost, and who was right and who was wrong. Such decommissioning as has occurred (nobody knows how much) was even carried out in secret, under terms dictated by Sinn Fein/IRA and supinely accepted by the two governments.

But the single-minded focus on guns and bombs was too narrow. The real issue was not disarmament alone, but rather the root-and-branch demobilization of a lethal and disciplined force in being. It is no excuse that it is easier to quantify weapons than to verify that the paramilitaries are going away for good, you know. This is the classic error of the theology of arms control, with its obsessive focus on numbers and deliberate blindness to the character and intentions of adversaries (often carried to the point of denying that real adversaries in fact exist).

Here's the fundamental flaw in the various "peace processes", including the Irish one: peace is a condition, not a process. Peace is guaranteed through victory in war. When both sides are too weak or unwilling to drive to victory, you wind up with a bloody stalemate and a long period of sporadic violence.