Did Obama Ask Peter King to be his Ambassador to Ireland?

Peter King, America’s worst Congressman, is back in the news and just as loathsome as ever. No surprise there. This, however, is news to me and wholly surprising:

After Obama was elected president, King got a call from Rahm Emanuel, the incoming chief of staff. “President-elect Obama would like you to be ambassador to Ireland,” said Emanuel, according to King’s recollection of the conversation.

King said he thought hard about it over a long weekend, fantasizing about hosting his Irish relatives at the ambassador’s 62-acre estate inside Dublin’s Phoenix Park, where the Irish president also lives. But King declined the offer.

“I just felt I would be defending foreign policy I didn’t agree with,” said King, “and to be sitting there with a bunch of Europeans spouting anti-American stuff, I would have a hard time.”

Can this really be true? We only seem to have King’s word for it so perhaps he’s exaggerrating matters. Perhaps Rahm Emanuel thought the Democrats could pick up King’s New York seat in a special election. Even so, it is extraordinary to think that the aministration even considered sending America’s most prominent IRA-apologist to Dublin. If they did then they should be ashamed of themselves.

Extraordinary for many reasons, not the least of them being that the Provisionals, however laughably, long-considered themselves the actual, legitimate government of Ireland and that the IRA was the national army. As the sole guardians, in their minds, of the legacy of the riginal pre-treaty Irish Republic, Sinn Fein and the IRA denied the existence of the Irish state in its modern, accepted form. The Official IRA made its peace with the Republic of Ireland but the Provisionals did not. They were no friends of Dublin even if, in rasher moments, some members of the Republic’s government sometimes thought they were.

Perhaps and despite being an IRA supporter King never shared this view. On the other hand he once called Garret Fitzgerald, then the Taoiseach, an Irish “Marshal Petain”. If memory serves this was around the time when the Irish government boycotted the annual St Patricks Day parade in New York City because, thanks in part to the influence of his Noraid chums, Peter King had been appointed the parade’s Grand Marshal.

So it is amazing to think the Obama administration could have thought him a suitable candidate for the Dublin post. Even by the debased standards of Ambassadorial appointments this would have been a new low.

The Washington Post’s article is all very well as far as it goes but, as tends to be the case when American newspapers write about Northern Ireland, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Readers unfamiliar with the subject could be forgiven for thinking that the choice – if choices had to be made – lay between the “Brits” and the IRA, as though there were no other alternatives.

But of course there were alternatives and they were favoured by the majority of Irish nationalists north and south of the border. Unsurprisingly, however, the SDLP receive nary a mention in the WaPo piece. And there’s the rub: King and those Americans who shared his views could have supported the perfectly-respectable United Ireland cause without endorsing or defending the IRA. They chose not to. Their hostility to Britain and to Unionists is fine; their preference for the IRA and Sinn Fein rather than the SDLP is inexcusable. The differences between Sinn Fein/IRA and the SDLP (or Fine Gael for that matter) were not merely of degree but of kind. King’s support for terrorists is and was an affront to decent nationalists.

Meanwhile, up pops Tony Blair with a cheery emailed statement about King:

“He had indeed been controversial (at least with the British!) in some of his earlier statements. But once he saw a path to peace that was just and deliverable, he urged and campaigned for everyone to take it,” Blair wrote in an e-mail. “I thought he was right in his concerns about the new global terrorism but could understand why he saw the Irish situation as different.”

I don’t know which is the most nauseating part of this. Blair’s apparent belief that terrorism in Ireland is apparently kinda-sorta understandable or that ghastly exclamation mark after “British”  hinting that, gosh, the Brits were just soooo silly to be concerned by King’s support for an organisation that had come close to assassinating both Margaret Thatcher and John Major (to say nothing of all the other outrages). What a fuss we British made over it all!

Then again, Blair’s record in Northern Ireland is not so great as he evidently thinks it is. Certainly, you needed the IRA for “peace” to work; there’s every difference between recognising that, however, and handing them the keys to the store.  All that mattered for Blair and Mo Mowlem and so on was the “path to peace” and never mind if it was either “just” or “deliverable”. As it turned out, the peace envisaged by the Good Friday Agreement was not in fact deliverable but by then it was more important that something be delivered and justice be damned. So, alone of the signatories to the Agreement, Sinn Fein and the IRA were not held to the promises they had made. That helped produce a peace of sorts but it was a shabby peace at the fag-end of a squalid conflict.

In the process the centre of Northern Irish civic and political life was fatally undermined. Once upon a time, children will need to be reminded, this centre had the support of most people. But Blair and Clinton helped hollow-out that centre, handing Northern Ireland to the extremists who, cunningly, appreciated there was no willingness to penalise them for their failure to live up to their own Agreement. Republican ideology was defeated but Republican terrorists were not. (The corollary: Unionism prevailed but moderate Unionism was annihilated. Its victory was intellectual, not visceral or psychological.)

It may reasonably be said that Northern Ireland is better-off today than it would have been had the conflict continued. It may also reasonably be said that the present state of affairs is also a mark of failure (and would certainly have been seen as such had it been posited as an outcome back when the Downing Street Declaration was signed) and, moreover, that it did not have to be this way.

Peter King could have been a decent Irish nationalist. He chose not to be.