What he never learned about Belfast
Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and a key architect of the Northern Ireland appeasement process, is obviously not quite as aloof as he appears. In the current issue of Prospect, he has been stung into writing a riposte to the profound criticism of that process levelled by Dean Godson, Charles Moore, myself and others. Naturally, he carefully labels it from the start a ‘right-wing critique’, thus warning everyone that it is beyond the pale (see my post below for an analysis of this mindset). However, he singles out only one element of the criticism: that the process destroyed the moderate parties in Northern Ireland and brought the extremes to power. Apart from denying this by blaming the moderate politicians themselves, his reasoning on this one point is deeply troubling. He writes:
Any peace process must involve talking to those with guns. How else are you going to stop the killing if you don't think there is a purely military solution?The brutal fact is that terrorism, like war, is only ever dealt with by military means or, in lesser emergencies, criminal justice prosecutions. Bringing it into the political arena -- 'talking to those with guns’ -- is invariably appeasement. What Powell fails to acknowledge in his article is that history shows over and over again that appeasement only ever produces injustice, violence and war. The charge against the Northern Ireland process of which he is so proud is that, as I wrote here, ‘talking to those with guns’ over a period of some two decades merely intensified terrorist violence, as it has done elsewhere; and although the bombs in Northern Ireland have now stopped (and it would be a brave person who would say, knowing the history of that province, that they will never start again) the price has been in some areas the destruction of the rule of law and a descent into a kind of mafia state with ex-paramilitaries now running protection rackets and imposing mob ‘justice’.