what a twit!!!!

Originally posted by debono ↑

The hard and lonely fight against terror

06 September 2004

Beslan is just the latest in a long list of terrorist atrocities worldwide. But can the war against global terror ever be won? In this article, written before the Beslan massacre, UUP leader David Trimble argues that 9/11 has transformed the terms of engagement with terrorists

There is an increasingly fashionable assumption in Europe that terrorism cannot be defeated, only appeased through a process of negotiation that concedes core elements of the terrorists' agenda. Northern Ireland is frequently cited as the proof of this assertion.

Indeed, Marjorie Mowlam, Tony Blair's first Northern Ireland Secretary of State and now his most disconnected former Cabinet member, has argued that America and Britain should negotiate with al-Qaida. That would be folly and would be to draw entirely the wrong lesson from the Northern Ireland conflict.

The fact is that the Provisional IRA suffered a military defeat. Gerry Adams might be the most famous Irishman on the planet but at the price of the collapse of his 'long war' strategy.

In February 2001, at an American Enterprise Initiative event chaired by Senator Fred Thompson in the Dirksen Building, I made the same point. I remember then that it was considered a controversial one. But since that moment, the truth has become increasingly clear. In particular, the scale of British Intelligence penetration at the highest level of the IRA's war machine has become widely known.

The objective of the IRA's terrorist campaign since 1970 had been to persuade a British Government to coerce the pro-British unionist majority in Northern Ireland, against its will, to enter an independent Irish state.

This was a necessary step on the road to its ultimate goal, a Celtic Cuba.

By 1994, its leaders knew that aim could not be achieved through terror.

I am not suggesting that the IRA was defeated by firepower alone. On the contrary, after the disaster of 'Bloody Sunday' in Londonderry in 1972, British policy shifted towards an intelligence-led approach and to 'Ulsterisation', the concentration of security force operations and responsibility in local hands if only because of the need for personnel who were steeped in the local culture. This combined with a steadfast refusal to deal politically with the IRA until violence ceased sapped the IRA's will to continue the "armed struggle".

The IRA managed to sustain very high levels of violence in the 1970s without achieving a breakthrough politically. Their inability to escalate their offensive in the 1980s, post-Ulsterisation, set the context for a peace process in the 1990s.

The Northern Ireland case points up the need for a total strategy, a rigidly disciplined and co-ordinated approach by all the different branches of the state. When this strategy broke down, as it did at times in Ulster, it merely delayed the final settlement by giving hope to the terrorists.

Key officials, politicians, and even military commanders, occasionally sent apparently emollient signals to the IRA. They gave sustenance and new life to the terrorist campaign. The IRA was encouraged to believe that 'one last heave' would see its goals fulfilled.

Of course, all is not rosy in the Northern Ireland garden. The institutions established under the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 have broken down. The principles of that Agreement are still sound nevertheless.

Above all, the people of Northern Ireland must be allowed to determine their future free from the threat of violence or coercion.

An innovative and radical form of powersharing between parties with wildly divergent communal interests was made possible. For almost two years under my leadership as First Minister, Northern Ireland experienced something considered unthinkable only a few years before.

That cross-community government fell but not through any inherent design fault in the structures negotiated in 1998. It fell because, as Prime Minister Blair conceded in 2002, even after 1998 the IRA had been allowed to use the threat of a return to violence to extract further concessions.

The failure to enforce key terms of the peace accord encouraged some elements in the IRA to engage in brazen adventures at home and abroad. A return to the armed struggle by the IRA was impossible but illegal activity on a significant scale continued both by the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries.

Interestingly, 19th century British statesmen at times wryly referred to the similarity between dealing with Catholic-Protestant tensions in Ireland and managing Sunni-Shia relations in Mesopotamia, present day Iraq. It is vital that both traditions are treated with rigorous fairness. I protested when British policy leant towards tolerating one side's illegalities but not the other's. Sunni insurgents and Shia insurgents must not be treated differentially.

The key question on the eve of another set of negotiations about Northern Ireland is whether or not Mr Blair's assessment of the post-9/11 world - that the threat of terrorist violence is no longer acceptable and that the IRA has no option but to disband - is understood and accepted by the IRA leadership.

It is clear that 9/11 transformed the terms of engagement with terrorists everywhere. Nothing but a strong stand will do. That will not always be popular, as we have seen in Spain, regardless of whether the enemy is al-Qaeda, Moqtada al-Sadr or the IRA.

Critics of President Bush charge that he has squandered the worldwide sympathy for the US that obtained in the immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers attack. That is not how it seems to me in Europe. There never was a golden age.

Let me give the example from Ireland, a European country with very close familial ties to America. After 9/11, the newspaper of the fastest-growing political party in Ireland, Sinn Fein, editorialised that the US had effectively brought the attack upon itself through its 'imperialist' foreign policy. Irish public opinion was massively against even the war in Afghanistan. The notion that a more sensitive, conscience-stricken US policy would generate more support in international councils is a delusion. It would merely send a sign of weakness to the terrorists. Success requires perseverance. It took a quarter of a century, at a high cost in terms of blood and treasure, but the British state and the local majority had stayed the course in Northern Ireland, just as the United States did through the 45 years of the Cold War. A humiliating withdrawal from Iraq with the job only half completed would be a shot in the arm for terrorists worldwide.

Pretending that the war against international terrorism can be won quickly is as illusory as pretending that a recalibration of US policy towards Israel will deliver a coup de grace against all the mutant violent forms of Islam that threaten our interests.

It was only through America's absolute dedication to the defeat of communism, and not through treating with it, that President Bush was able to deliver his important recent speech signalling the redeployment of US forces away from Germany and Asia.

The sad reality is that in much of Western Europe the potential threat from GM foods and juvenile obesity exercise the minds of politicians more than does the threat from revolutionary Islam.

As a former First Minister of Northern Ireland, I know that unless terrorism and totalitarianism have visited your door and murdered thousands of your citizens, you do not fully grasp its enormity, its evil, and the necessity to defeat it. The truth is that the battle against terror is not only hard, but lonely.

This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.