Good-Bye, Mr. Trimble

We’ll have more to say about the critically important British General Election shortly, but, as the late-counting results come in from Northern Ireland, we are witnessing the death of both parties that brought Unionists and Republicans to the peace table through the Clinton-brokered Good Friday Agreement.

Under that Agreement, like many fostered on a gullible and unsuspecting public in troubled areas of the world by Clinton, the parties agreed to foreswear the use of arms as a political tool, to demobilize their military (i.e. terrorist) elements and take their points of view to the ballot box through the normal democratic process. Enforcing such undertakings would be nothing more than “goodwill,” as illusory now as in 1938. Actual reality was dispensed with in exchange for ever-more laudatory speeches at ever-more lavish and self-congratulatory dinner parties.

David Trimble, the brave and sensible leader of the then-mainstream Unionist party, the Ulster Unionists, argued that the Agreement ushered in a new area in that it marked an acceptance by IRA/Sinn Fein of the majority rule concept in the province and, thus, the legitimacy of the Union. He was assured by the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach that IRA/Sinn Fein would be held to their promises or be exposed as die-hard terrorists who would never accept a peaceful resolution to the issue.

For this effort, Trimble was praised far and wide. Yet, among the real Unionists who live in the province, there was a great deal of uneasiness about IRA/Sinn Fein’s commitment to peace. The other main Unionist party, the Democratic Unionists, spoke for these common fears and dared to call terrorists terrorists. For this, and most famously for their leader daring to call the Prime Minister a liar in Parliament after he had failed, yet again, to hold the IRA/Sinn Fein to its promises, the DUP was for years a pariah. It was they, these fanatics, who prevented the “peace process” from developing by so inconveniently pointing out time and time again that the Good Friday Agreement required nothing but sacrifice by the Unionists and concession after concession to the Republicans.

While a known terrorist and murderer took the portfolio for educating Northern Ireland’s children, the Unionists looked to Trimble who doggedly stuck to the script, warning after a time that the IRA/Sinn Fein would really have to disarm and accept the democratic principle or else disaster loomed for the Agreement.

On the Republican side, the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party had argued that the “force tradition” of their IRA/Sinn Fein cousins was a losing cause that could only bring misery to the Republican community and set back the cause. Looking for a new way forward, the Republicans put their hope in the SDLP and its negotiations with Trimble’s UUP.

For its part, however, IRA/Sinn Fein presented a double face: surface acceptance of the peace process while waging an unrelenting war against the British and the Irish governments. (Note to my fellow Green Americans: IRA/Sinn Fein holds the Irish Republic as illegitimate as the union in the North with the United Kingdom). And, as each new deadline under the Good Friday Agreement came and passed without significant IRA/Sinn Fein concessions, and as successive British and Irish governments continued to cave under P. O’Neill’s threats to “abandon” the peace process and re-start what they call a war, the Republican community came to recognize that real power, real respect flowed from the point of a gun and not the SDLP leader’s Nobel Peace Prize.

By such cravenness and cowardice, the British and Irish Governments have created a new political reality in Northern Ireland where the Unionist community has come to recognize that it will be sold out at every corner under terrorist pressure; it has voted accordingly, giving the anti-Agreement DUP an enormous victory. At the same time, the Republican community has come to recognize that talking peace while threatening war is a way to move forward, effectively vindicating Gerry Adams’ strategy to the fullest.

The inevitable result is there for everyone to see. The IRA/Sinn Fein mafia is now entrenched in power, as mainstream as it ever has been, while those in the Unionist community that argued with their neighbors and took a leap for peace have been revealed as nothing more than dupes, to be betrayed at the first instance.

Both the UUP and its leader, David Trimble, have been swept out of power, replaced by the DUP. And the SLDP has been humiliated, replaced by IRA/Sinn Fein as the party of Republicans north of the Border.

Another Clinton treaty. Another piece of paper that meant peace in our time. Another Oslo. From Israel to Iran to Libya to the streets of Londonderry, there is no negotiating with terrorists.

A lesson the good Mr. Trimble, no doubt, now feels at the depths of his soul.

UPDATE:

A regular reader, Harkonnendog, posts in the comments section a reply from a Scot friend regarding this post. We post that reply here, along with our own responses. (We have taken the liberty of correcting small spelling errors in the post, since they are obviously the result of haste and not a lack of basic grammatical knowledge.)

I read the post you linked to, and I have to say the author is either blinkered by his own agenda or knowingly filtering the facts to fit that agenda.

We have no agenda except the defeat of terrorism. In Northern Ireland, this means opposition to both physical force tradition Republicans and so-called “Loyalist” terrorists. We did not knowingly leave out any facts, though, as we will spell out below, we welcome any facts our Scottish friend can add to the debate.

The simple truth is that the DUP are as connected to Unionist terrorists as Sinn Fein are to Republican ones. Both the UDA and they are simple criminals, hiding their money-making schemes of drugs-dealing, arms trafficking and extortion rackets in the streets of Ireland behind the sectarian cloak of Protestant vs Catholic and Unionist vs Republican.

We are in full agreement with our correspondent on the point that Sinn Fein are connected to terrorists. On the DUP point, we are much less sure. There is no doubt that the more rapid elements of the DUP, including its leader Paisley, harbor no deep regret at the existence of Loyalist terror. That said, we also have never seen any evidence of coordination or cross-membership. If the DUP is merely a Loyalist terror front, then why the PUP and other openly Loyalist parties? Sinn Fein’s leadership is co-existent with the IRA’s Army Council, as has been widely known for years. Certain elements in the DUP may take pleasure from Loyalist acts, but do not—so far as we know—direct them. If our Scot analyst has established facts to the contrary, we would dearly love to see them demonstrated.

The failure of the latest accord is purely down to one fundamentalist politician with close ties to terrorists. Ian Paisley of the DUP demanded that photos of the destruction of IRA weapons be a condition of signing the accord, a move that his own Protestant faction would never have agreed for the weapons of the UDA, their own terror group. His cynical demand would have meant the humiliation of his enemies, a move to which he knew they would never agree. The backlash from that demand took certain IRA extremists out of the control of their central leaders for a while. Paisley's actions were in perfect keeping with the profile of a man who has made famous the phrase "we will never surrender, never, never, never."

We are at a loss to explain why a demand for physical evidence of decommissioning is extreme, regardless of source, or how one man from a (formerly) minority party could wield such all-encompassing power. Sinn Fein/IRA freely signed up for the process, as one may recall. If Sinn Fein/IRA was going to be spooked by some posing by the “reverend” on this point, they were never very serious to begin with. Note especially that this really boils down to excuse making: Sinn Fein/IRA did not live up to its freely undertaken obligations under the Agreement because Paisley was embarrassing them.

Interestingly, Mr. Paisley likes to style himself Reverend Paisley. His doctorate is an honorary one, bestowed by the Bob Jones University, in South Carolina, famous for it's rule against interracial relationships amongst it's students, the anti-Catholic zeal of founder Bob Jones and that same founders letter of congratulations to President Bush on his re-election which exhorted Bush with the words "you owe the liberals nothing". Ian Paisley is certainly the ideological peer of Bob Jones. When Dublin's Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, invited him to breakfast at the Irish Embassy in London recently, he insisted on having two hard-boiled eggs, which he could break open himself. This, he explained to Mr Ahern, was to ensure that he couldn't be poisoned.

Okay, we get it: you don’t like Paisley. You’re not alone on this judgment. In fact, we share it. Yet, your argument never deals with the whys and wherefores of how, exactly, almost the entire Unionist community has been driven into his party’s arms. Could it be that the shameful appeasement of both the Irish and British Governments have driven a community that took a true leap of faith for peace into the arms of a man who told them all along they would be played for fools?

You see, it is idiots like this on both sides who have ensured the political divide has widened for their own self-aggrandizement.

The “a pox on both their houses” stance inherent in this statement is just more avoidance of the adult moral responsibility to make judgments. Fact is, the Unionist community made a clenched-teeth move for peace and supported a leader who could take them there. This fact was judged as weakness by both Labour and Conservative residents at No. 10 as well as by the IRA. The result, as we noted above, is clear: the Unionist community now knows it is all alone, that it has no partner for peace and, thus, has reached for the most anti-Agreement leadership it could find.

As for the "Clinton-sponsored" peace process...the fact that Clinton had anything to do with it was scarcely registered in Ireland or the UK. The same goes for Bush's intervention more recently. Both are regarded as amusing attempts by the Big Guy O'er the Water to pretend he knows what the fuck is going on in the Old Country.

We agree so far as Bush is concerned; however, all sides have stated publicly and often that the Good Friday Agreement would not have been possible without the direct, personal intervention of President Clinton. No serious observer of the political process would agree that the President’s involvement “was scarcely registered in Ireland or the UK.” A simple Google search on the relevant terms will reveal facts strongly to the contrary, and readers are invited to investigate and judge for themselves on this point. To cite just one obvious example, former Senator George Mitchell, Clinton’s personal envoy, was the main mediator during the final and crucial stages of the Agreement’s drafting.

Americans, according to the extremists on both sides, are good for money but don't expect them to understand more than the surface appearances or, heaven forbid, make sense.

We have no doubt that this is a widespread belief in the British Isles, which goes a long way towards explaining why such little real understanding of American or American political goals exists there.

We may or may not be making sense, but the fact is an election has just been held and both parties that brought about the Good Friday Agreement have been wiped out. This is either due to the fact that the Agreement was not sufficiently thought-out or enforced, as we argue, or because one minority party leader was a big old meanie.

You be the judge of which is likelier.

Andrew Stumbles Upon The Key

At the end of a defense of his equation of Islamic Fascism (which he calls "Islamic Fundamentalism") and run-of-the-mill Christian Fundamentalism today in the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan remarked:

Or maybe Hitch and I are the only ones to see a connection.

Could be.

Or maybe--just maybe--it could be that you and Hitch are both British men of the Left, and, thus, are radically opposed to religion in your core and, as a result, share a fundamentally different worldview on matters of religion from we Americans?

Believe the Worst, Proof Not Necessary

Besides death and taxes, another constant in life is that whenever one criticizes liberals for their obsessive need to find fault with the United States and Americans one is objected to on the grounds that one is “questioning their patriotism.” Since liberals have barely a shred of patriotism of any variety, one wonders why this stirs them so, but there you have it. Somehow, they think that if they simply repeat that defensive mantra enough the rest of us in the real world will agree to pretend to stop noticing how they seem to relish any opportunity to piss on America.

Take Bob Herbert, for example. No one screams louder than he and his colleagues at The New York Times whenever some poor conservative has the gall to point out the blindingly obvious, i.e. that in their feverish Bush-hatred they would welcome with glee an American defeat in Iraq or Afghanistan—and preferably both if possible.

Herbert’s columns have all the nuance and sophistication of a college freshman writing his first essay for the “alternative” school paper (it’s all about some guy he just read for the first time named Chomsky), but at least one could always count on them as a sort of bellwether indicating This Week’s Liberal Line, which, of course, replaces last week’s liberal line (the harsh Afghan winter, the Taliban cannot be defeated, we are torturing prisoners of war as a matter of policy, the harsh Iraqi summer, the Republican guard cannot be defeated, we are rounding up innocent Muslims on trumped-up charges, the Patriot Act is unconstitutional, the President’s authority to hold enemy combatants is unconstitutional, no one will vote in the Iraqi elections, the elections perhaps were successful but will result in no change in the long run, the Iraqi “insurgency” is unbeatable) on account of it having been proved decisively wrong by what we here at New Sisyphus like to call the “reality-based community.”

Today, Herbert uses the experience of a bitter Army Reservist who is apparently the son of an FSO to charge the following:

The officer's comment [about going to Iraq to kill “ragheads”] was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."

We have no doubt that some of our soldiers are up to no good and that some have committed crimes. Abu Ghraib springs to mind, for example. And any sober analysis of soldiers’ behavior during wartime has to include as fact the undeniable reality that some soldiers step over the line. Even during World War II, the so-called “good war,” we hung scores of G.I.s for rape, murder and vicious assaults on civilians.

What distinguishes those crimes from, say, Nazi brutality was that they were engaged in by one or a few men who were acting as criminals and not as instruments of state policy. As the reports flowing from the Abu Ghraib prison incidents have conclusively proved, the acts done were the criminal acts of a few and not persons engaged in freelance torture winked at by their superiors and even encouraged.

Here we have, yet again, another liberal columnist—don’t question his patriotism—taking the word of one disaffected soldier to charge that American soldiers, at the urging and with the approval of their superiors—are engaging in wholesale brutality against Iraqi civilians. Neither Herbert nor the Times at large bothered to check out the tale of this soldier nor talk to the scores of violently anti-American BBC and European reporters on the scene in Iraq that would pounce quicker on proven incidents of American brutality than they ever would on yet another boring story about more boring mass graves containing the poor, forgotten boring victims of the Iraqi Fascist regime.

Always willing to ascribe to their fellow Americans, especially the American soldier, the worst motives, always willing to believe with no evidence the most fantastic anti-American stories, today’s liberals show their true colors without bothering to even pretend to hide them first.

In other news, surely not connected, the circulation numbers for the MSM continue to fall. Rapidly.

UPDATE:

Rich Lowry of NRO’s the Corner reports that the soldier Herbert relies on for the truth in Iraq has been, shall we say, embellishing his story. Note especially the details about praying he added: this was obviously coldly calculated to please a left-wing audience and confirm its worst fears about our soldiers.
If true, and the source is impeccable, the New York Times and Herbert have even more explaining than usual to do:

“Here is his version of the Abu Ghraib story in an interview with Democracy Now!:

And I remember just sort of questioning the guy, saying, “Do you really feel proud of having shot an unarmed man who threw a stone?” He was like, “Well, I'm doing my job.” It was a very machismo thing, to have killed someone. I felt this immense loathing and this immense disgust for the whole incident.

Here is his version in the Herbert column:

Mr. Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees. "I asked him," said Mr. Delgado, "if he was proud that he had shot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn't get mad at all. He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down”