Neoconservatives on Northern Ireland

Dean Godson

Dean Godson appears to have been the first neoconservative to take a close interest in the Northern Ireland peace process. According to his friend David Frum, Godson kept a close eye on the issue during his time as chief editorial writer of the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s:

Dean kept pointing out that the Israeli, Colombian, and Irish processes all shared a dangerous defect: They were attempts to make peace with terrorist adversaries who were not sincerely committed to peace. As US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair lavished their patience and ingenuity to bring the two sides together, Dean kept perceiving that Clinton and Blair were engaging in a massive self-deception—refusing to see facts as they were, because those facts were too ugly and depressing.

In the light of later developments, two things are notable about this account, firstly that the adversary Israel was negotiating with at this stage was Fatah, rather than Hamas. Secondly, that Godson's critique rested on the similarity between the conflicts rather than the differences between them.

Himself Alone

According to Frum, Godson's 2004 biography of David Trimble Himself Alone was "an attempt through very close study of day-by-day events to show how democratic politicians can be sucked into a process of concession-making to those who intend to destroy democracy."

Melanie Phillips drew attention to the parallels with Israel in remarks at the book's launch:

Those of us who, like me, care deeply about another terrible conflict in the world, the one in the Middle East, surely cannot fail to see certain similarities with Israel. There too one finds a people who are unloved by much of the rest of the world, whose history is either unknown or misrepresented, and who the world regards with at best indifference at worst the feeling that, if they simply vanished off the face of the earth, they would do everyone else a favour. But there is one big difference. For although Israel is also urged to negotiate with terror, it has chosen instead to try to destroy it through military means - for which it has been turned into the pariah of the world by a Europe for whom terrorists turn into freedom fighters if they choose to attack a western democracy.

Lessons from Northern Ireland

In October that year, Godson offered his Lessons from Northern Ireland for the Arab-Israeli Conflict in an article for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a think tank headed by former Benjamin Netanyahu advisor Dore Gold.

The piece noted the historical links between the two conflicts, not least "in the person of Senator George Mitchell, who chaired the talks in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1998 and then came up with the Mitchell Commission plan during the very last phase of the Barak government in 2000-2001." Godson nevertheless deprecated what he called the "international ideology of Northern Ireland." He was particularly critical of former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain and of Alistair Crooke, an MI6 officer who had worked for the Mitchell Commission and been involved in negotiations with both the IRA and Hamas.

Godson's analysis suggested that the British viewed both unionists and Israelis as 'Afrikaaners' who needed to be taken down a peg or two. "Israel has a right to exist and Northern Ireland has a right to exist through the formula of the consent principle. Beyond that, though, almost everything else is up for grabs." Unionists were persuaded to accept a settlement that was "well short of their historic aspirations" while republicans benefited from "disproportionate political concessions."

The British fear that if the Sinn Fein politicos are undermined, "mainstream" Republican gunmen will bolt to the dissident Real IRA. This is similar to the line of reasoning that unless concessions are made to Arafat, Palestinians will move over to Hamas.

In Godson's view this pattern of concessions to republicans could be expected to continue indefinitely:

Indeed, one unique aspect of policy in Northern Ireland is that the British state is well-nigh unique in advertising, quite openly, that it does not really mind if it is dismembered - subject, of course, to the consent principle. All it wants is that the IRA and the Republican movement - in the main - abandon full-scale violence, and then all other roads are open. To ensure that abandonment of violence, the British will maintain the pace of concessions, at least for as long as the Unionists are prepared to tolerate them. And because the British have been working on the Unionist community for so long, they reckon that they have a very good chance of maintaining that grip on events.

Godson's underlying logic assumes a basic similarity between the two conflicts. An Arab-Israeli settlement inspired by the Irish peace process would be a bad settlement for Israelis for the same reasons that the original was a bad deal for unionists.

David Trimble

It was ironic therefore that Godson's argument would be taken up by the unionist leader who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement. In October 2007, David Trimble wrote a pamphlet called Misunderstanding Ulster for the Conservative Friends of Israel. He acknowledged Godson as a 'driving force' behind the pamphlet, and reiterated many of his points, including his criticisms of Peter Hain and Alistair Crooke.

Trimble warned that "in some quarters of the British establishment, pride in the state’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process has gradually developed into something resembling over-confidence" and offered "a word of caution about the growing tendency to set up Northern Ireland as a model for conflict resolution."

To this extent, Trimble was clearly indebted to Godson's argument, yet in other respects, he completely inverted it. Not suprisingly, perhaps, he regarded the peace process as fundamentally a success.

it is hard to answer in the negative when the British Government when asks rhetorically, ‘is Northern Ireland not a better place today than it was ten, fifteen, twenty years ago?’ The answer, manifestly, is yes. The Agreement and the peace process that surrounds it has saved lives that would otherwise have been lost had the conflict continued.

Trimble criticised attempts to apply an Irish formula to the Middle East, not because the peace process was a failure, but because its success had been misunderstood.

In some quarters, it would seem that there has been a selective reading and application of key events, revealing more about contemporary agendas in the Middle East than serious analysis of the recent history of Northern Ireland.

Trimble highlighted several arguments which he suggested highlighted the limits of the analogy. On one such point, he quoted the Israeli ambassador to Ireland:

Central to the divergence between them, he argued, were the contrasting ideological impulses between the IRA and Hamas, with the latter still driven wholeheartedly by,

the desire to create an Islamist state based on Islamic law over all the land, not just the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel as well…. Hamas officials continue in their refusal to recognise Israel’s right to exist.

This would be picked up by later writers along with two other points:

Allied to this, it is important to recognise that another key factor underlying the Northern Ireland peace process – which is not necessarily replicated elsewhere – concerns the attitude of the state parties to the conflict. The two state actors involved in that conflict, held a shared interest in achieving stability and ending the violence in Northern Ireland.

Militarily, meanwhile, the unspoken truth was that the British Government could, if it wished, deploy overwhelming force to the province: it enjoyed total dominance of the territorial waters around Northern Ireland, the airspace and – save for a small area adjacent to the Irish border where South Armagh’s “bandit country” prevailed – the land. The same cannot be said for Israel vis-à-vis those who face it with hostility.

Trimble's critique of the analogy was welcomed by Melanie Phillips, who wrote:

A variety of individuals and organisations in Britain, the US and elsewhere are spouting this ahistorical and ignorant view which has gained significant and alarming traction in the upper reaches of the British establishment. I am glad to see that in his pamphlet, Lord Trimble specifically singles out by name the ‘conflict resolution’ groups Conflicts Forum and Forward Thinking, as well as Peter Hain, Daniel Levy and Michael Ancram, who are busy promoting this view, every part of which is false.

Frampton and Bew

As well as Dean Godson, those credited in Trimble's pamphlet included historians John Bew and Martyn Frampton who went on to develop a similar argument in their own pamphlet for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. In Talking to Terrorists: The Myths, Misconceptions and Misapplication of the Northern Ireland Peace Process identified what they regarded as key differences between the conflicts in Northern Ireland and in the Middle East:

Hamas is a very different organization to the IRA. Unlike the IRA and the British Government - which objected to the means rather than the ends of the IRA campaign - Hamas' founding objectives are irreconcilable with the existence of the Israeli state.

Unlike Northern Ireland, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one in which a number of regional powers have an important stake. Moreover, also unlike Northern Ireland, it would appear that some of the main players in the conflict have no interest in peace and stability.

The key variable in Northern Ireland was not the act of talking to terrorists, so much as the timing of this process. The Hamas of 2008 is a very different force from the IRA of the early 1990s, which sought entry into the political process because it felt that its existing strategy was not working.

Themes

The Irish Model

Since September 11th there is something called the "international ideology of Northern Ireland," which has found particular expression in the post-September 11 anti-terrorism legislation of 2001 and in subsequent British measures.

Advocating the Northern Irish "model" has become a popular pastime. In conflicts as different as those in Spain, Sri Lanka and the Middle East, the key players are now urged to consider the undoubted success in Northern Ireland and follow our example.

In some quarters of the British establishment, pride in the state’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process has gradually developed into something resembling over-confidence. It is now increasingly common to hear Northern Ireland held up as an example for the rest of the world, as a beacon for peacemaking and a guiding light for areas where violence has dominated political life.

"The release of an insider account of the Northern Irish peace process by Jonathan Powell (formerly Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair) has led to a new round of speculation about the "lessons of Ulster" and the possibility that there exists a "model" of conflict resolution that can be applied elsewhere."

Talking to terror régimes empowers mass murderers and undermines moderates. So why is this disastrous proposal now running so strongly? One key factor is Northern Ireland, where the British establishment has convinced itself that it brought about peace by talking to the IRA.

Whole careers are now based on the idea that the "peace process" in Northern Ireland is the paradigm by which all other conflicts can be solved.

Concessions

Like Yasser Arafat's PLO and the Colombian Marxist insurgents, the Irish republican negotiaters won concession after concession with promise after promise—only to pocket the concessions and break the promises.

Now part of this rests on a belief in tolerating ambiguity in the renunciation of physical force by that particular cadre of insurgents who have been selected as partners until such time as they can supposedly shut down violence for good. Of course, in exchange for affording them that space, Adams and others continue to secure further concessions through the movement's residual capacity for violence."

Appeasement

There is a profound belief, which existed in official British circles prior to 1997 but which skyrocketed since then, that tough measures against terrorism in Northern Ireland and against Palestinian terrorism are massively counter-productive, and that they are especially counter-productive once the British have selected partners for peace from within the relevant insurgent movements.

Paul M. Kennedy, a British historian at Yale, has written that for 70 years until the Second World War, appeasement was an established feature of British foreign policy. He defines it as a way of settling quarrels "by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise".

Alistair Crooke

There are vague echoes here of the mission of Alistair Crooke, the former MI6 officer who served in Northern Ireland and who has been seeking to bring Hamas into the fold as the only people who can "deliver" on a settlement.

And at the end of October, the taxpayer-funded Institute of Contemporary Arts was due to host a debate between Usama Hamdan, of Hamas's governing council, and Alistair Crooke, a former British spy and founder of Conflicts Forum, which describes Palestinian terror as legitimate "resistance" and which has argued for "engagement" with Hamas.

At present, through groups like Conflicts Forum and Forward Thinking, the former Northern Ireland minister Michael Ancram travels around cosying up to terrorists, citing his credentials in Northern Ireland. The non-Muslim Islamist (and former MI6 man) Alastair Crooke manages to blur the lines between diplomacy and advocacy using the same delusion.

Existential threat

The British government, it has been noted, repeatedly affirmed its lack of strategic interest in Northern Ireland. This it could do because the aims of the IRA posed no existential threat to the British state (though, it should be noted that they did pose an existential threat to the Northern Irish state) and, as a result, the British state had no fundamental objection to the IRA's key objective - the reunification of Ireland.

Despite its bloodthirsty thuggery and wearisome sadism, the IRA never had in any of its manifestations a desire to annihilate the British state.

IRA defeated

The key variable in Northern Ireland was not the act of talking to terrorists, so much as the timing of this process. The Hamas of 2008 is a very different force from the IRA of the early 1990s, which sought entry into the political process because it felt that its existing strategy was not working.

The IRA itself renounced violence because it had been beaten into a stalemate by the Army.

The IRA came to the table saying they wanted to negotiate when they had already been made operationally incapable. By the early 1990s, barely a bomb could be planted or a plot hatched without it becoming clear that the British security services were aware of it as soon as the IRA high command was.

Regional backdrop

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Republic of Ireland had become a force for stability and peace in Northern Ireland and worked in close cooperation with the British government in the search for a settlement. The same cannot be said of Israel's neighbors. On the contrary, Iran and Syria continue to support Hamas and encourage its violent campaign, offering it arms, funding, training, and sanctuary.

Victory

But what is the definition of victory in Northern Ireland? The British do not define "victory" as the military defeat of the IRA. Firstly, they do not believe it was possible, but even if it was possible, they do not believe in such a defeat as a matter of principle.

Yet despite effectively gaining victory, the government never pressed home its advantage and failed to take the opportunity to strangle the IRA, not at birth but at the moment when it was comparatively vulnerable. This mistake is now again returning to haunt us. The conflict is said to have been "resolved". It should have been won.