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British Role in NI is a Model for Disaster
By Tom Hayden
There they were on global television, George Bush and Tony Blair, celebrating
victory in Iraq and citing Northern Ireland as an example of their benign
achievements. To anyone with an Irish consciousness, it was a déjà
vu of empires lost and found.
To the American television audience, for whom history seems either sanitary
or deleted, the British presented themselves as having a superior sophistication
for winning hearts and minds.
As of this writing (April 17, nearly Easter), there is still no potable
water in Basra. Instead of cheering Iraqis, the Shiite population seems
a bit cold. Have patience, we are advised, it will take time for these
Shiites to warm up after Saddam’s chilling rule. Line them up, give
out candy to the children, keep promising the food and water, and tolerate
a bit of looting which, after all, is to be expected in the first phase
of untidy freedom.
Repeatedly we’ve been told the British Army has gained its experience
on the streets of Northern Ireland. Not once on American television has
this master narrative been questioned.
Let’s leave aside the question of why the British were booted out
of Basra by the Iraqis in 1932, and examine the value of this “experience”
in Northern Ireland.
If the experience in question is operating a counter-insurgency war, that
would fortify the Irish Republican Army’s contention that the British
military does not withdraw from places like South Armagh because it is
using the area as a training camp for future Basras.
If the experience in question is that of a dirty war of agents and proxies,
the Stevens Report issued this April should be required reading for Iraq
watchers. Sir John Stevens’ interim findings point to British collusion
in dozens of loyalist paramilitary murders in Northern Ireland, including
that of human rights lawyer Patrick Finucane in 1989. The Northern Ireland
conflict, according to Stevens, was needlessly prolonged by a secret core
of “out of control” officers who ratcheted up the “hatred
and bitterness” between Catholics and Protestants. These were state-sanctioned
assassinations of “a lot of innocent people.” As the respected
Financial Times summarized, “Loyalist assassination squads were used
by a secretive unit of the British state to target Roman Catholics during
Margaret Thatcher’s war on IRA terrorism during the 1980s and early
1990s.”
If the experience in question is how to master and justify deceit through
public policy, the expert would be Brigadier Frank Kitson, who pioneered
the techniques in Kenya before implementing them in Northern Ireland.
In his classic book Low Intensity Operations (1973), Kitson recommended
blatantly that “The law should be used as just another weapon in
the Government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more
than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public.”
If the experience in question is conflict resolution, however, the role
of the British in Northern Ireland is a model for disaster. The British
forces spent 30 years trying unsuccessfully to crush the IRA, isolate
republicans from nationalists, inflate a moderate centrist coalition,
create free elections and all the while maintain UK control. If Bush and
Blair expected to declare victory in Northern Ireland at their Belfast
press conference, they were still blinded by arrogant prejudice.
The British once again have assumed the imperial right to suspend elections
in Northern Ireland because their preferred candidates might not win.
Their unionist allies now want to kick Sinn Féin out of government
by a majority vote, instead of weighted voting, if there is so much as
a riot in Belfast.
Is that the kind of governing process envisioned for Iraq?
Lines drawn by the British empire imposed almost a century ago divided
the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. Does anyone believe they will be unified
in a new, independent Iraq without US-UK control?
Blair now is lauding the Royal Ulster Constabulary as having “the
particular skills to rebuild law and order in Iraq (Northern Ireland News,
April 16, 2003). Meanwhile, The Sunday Independent (among other media)
is blasting Blair for not being as tough on Sinn Féin as Bush has
been on Saddam. In a front-page column, Eoghan Harris wants the Bush hawks
to replace the State Department doves in the Irish peace process. “Iraq,
like Ireland, is much safer in the hands of hawks with moral clarity than
doves who want to do business with despots. If Bush wants the IRA to deliver
[on decommissioning], he should recall Richard Haass and send in Richard
Perle.”
Turns out that Eoghan Harris, proud of having “said goodbye to socialism,”
is an “embedded” consultant on television communication techniques
to the man Richard Perle, among others, wants to install as the Pentagon’s
very own president in Baghdad, Ahmad Chalabi.
What goes around comes around. Just as the sun never sets on certain empires.
Tom Hayden has been a leading civil rights activist since the 1960s.
A California State Senator for eighteen years, he was part of the U.S.
Commerce Department delegation to Northern Ireland in 1995, and has authored
legislation to include the Famine in California’s school curriculum.
He is the author and editor of many books including Reunion: A Memoir
and Irish Hunger and Irish on the Inside (Verso, 2001) and presently is
working on a book on American street gangs from the Irish to the Crips
and Bloods. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute.
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