Talking to terrorists
The interview with Tony Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell on BBC TV’s Andrew Marr show this morning, like his interview in the Guardian yesterday, confirmed my suspicions of the amoral and dangerous arrogance at the top of the Whitehall machine. Boasting of the success of the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland which he claimed had drawn a line once and for all under the troubles in that province (ignoring the fact that parts of it have now been turned into a kind of mafia state, as the former paramilitaries have channelled their violence into protection rackets which they operate with impunity since the rule of law went down the pan along with the political centre ground as a result of this appeasement process) he went on to say that the success of talking to Northern Ireland’s terrorists suggested that we should now be talking to al Qaeda, the Taleban and Hamas.
1) Whatever dim view one might have taken of it, and however abhorrent were the terrorists’ methods of bringing it about, the IRA’s aim of a united Ireland was a perfectly reasonable proposition. It was certainly something one could talk about. There are however certain propositions one cannot talk about. Hitler’s plan for world domination and the extermination of the Jews fell into that category. So does the very similar agenda currently advanced by al Qaeda, Hamas, the Taleban and Iran. One cannot and should not talk to them because there is, or should be, nothing to talk about. The very act of talking opens the possibility that their agenda will at some point be negotiable, which is half-way to surrender.
2) That is also why there is a huge difference between talking to ex-terrorists who have renounced violence for ever and terrorists who are continuing to murder and to terrorise. Since the latter is such a signal of weakness, it gives active terrorists every incentive to step up the violence. What Powell failed to acknowledge was that when the British government covertly contacted the IRA in the seventies and eighties, the terrorism worsened.
3) Perhaps the most important difference of all, however, is that — as Powell himself acknowledged this morning without following through his own point —the IRA themselves acknowledged that ‘the war is over’ because they realised they couldn’t win. They had effectively been beaten at least into a stalemate which they knew they couldn’t break. That is very different from al Qaeda, Hamas, the Taleban and Iran whose violent tails are still very much up. To negotiate with any or all of them would not merely strengthen them and recruit untold additional numbers to the cause, but it would cut the ground from under the feet of the more moderate Muslim states and Muslim reformers around the world and hand power to the extremists — just as Powell achieved in Northern Ireland, but with rather more dramatic global consequences.