Responding to Stephen Walt’s hypothetical (What if Gaza were full of jews?), Megan McArdle compares the Israel lobby to the Irish-American lobby. Ross Douthat says, OK, but the IRA was still considered a terrorist organisation. Daniel Larison dives into the weeds of US attitudes towards Irish terrorism. He writes:
True enough. And of course the State Department did have the IRA on its list of terrorist groups. Nonetheless, the State Department is not quite the same as the US government. And in the 1990s there’s no denying that Washington generally shared the (Irish) Republican analysis of the state of play in Ulster. Indeed the Clinton administration viewed itself as a kind of backstop looking after Sinn Fein’s interetss and point of view. Crucially, that’s how the Republican movement saw the Americans too. They were there to provide support and ballast for the nationalist viewpoint, countering the presumed pro-Unionist bias of the British. That is to say, Dublin and Washington would, together, counter the Brits in Belfast and London. It’s peace, of a sort, but it’s not a result that was supposed to happen. Nor is it one that many people would have found acceptable back in, say, 1994.
Sure, Clinton made plenty of phone calls and a visit or two. But when push came to shove he refused to put additional pressure on Sinn Fein and the IRA. Consequently the Good Friday Agreement was signed despite there being a crippling ambiguity on the question of decommissioning terrorist arms. The failure to resolve that problem would cripple the peae “settlement” for years, helping to hollow-out the centre of Northern Irish politics, leading us to the present happy state of play: government by bigots and murderers.
This wasn’t, obviously, all Clinton’s fault. Nontheless one reason Tony Blair lost faith in the american president was Clinton’s habit of promising to lean on the Republican movement and then signally failing to follow his promises with, like, actual action. The State Department may have been hostile to the IRA -it opposed giving Gerry Adams visas to enter the US – but the rest of the US government, including the likes of Tony Lake at the National Security Council was entirely sympathetic to the “cause” of Irish Republicanism.
Daniel says:
True enough. However, as I say, I think that there was, despite all the public pronouncements to the contrary, a kind of sotto voce enthusiasm for the IRA and its aims if not always its methods!) that persisted, despite the powerful inducements to give the British the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, it’s probably not entirely coincidental that Washington became more interested in the Irish problem once a) a Democrat was back in the White House and b) the Cold War had ended, lessening British influence in Washington and the importance of assuaging British concerns. (Also, of course, Reagan was not likely to look too favourably upon the people who tried to murder his great friend Margaret.) Still, when the “peace process” got underway it didn’t come as much surprise to discover that the US was in the green corner. No suprise there and it might be, too, that this was necessary. But let’s not pretend that Washington was a neutral player.
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