Huddling with Terrorists
Same story, for the umpteenth time.

August 9, 2001 8:55 a.m.

orthern Ireland had another one of its ''historic breakthroughs'' to ''peace'' last week when the IRA promised that it would think very carefully about ''decommissioning'' its guns and explosives at some point in the future. Alas, Unionist hard-liners refused to accept this olive branch. Once again, therefore, there is a ''crisis.'' Within the next six weeks, the British government must either suspend the Northern Ireland power-sharing assembly and the ''peace process'' or call new elections, which would probably elect the ''extremes'' in both Catholic and Protestant communities.

Or so the British and Irish governments say. And so the U.S. government accepts. And so the U.S. press repeats. For the umpteenth time.

On this occasion, however, I do not need to list the many previous ''historic breakthroughs'' on which the two governments have hailed an IRA promise to surrender its armory. Andrew Sullivan in The New Republic and Jenny McCartney in the Sunday Telegraph have done so both exhaustively and effectively.

Let me quote just one recent case from McCartney: ''Remember, in May 2000, how — to great fanfare — the IRA opened up a few selected bunkers to inspections by a two-man team which it had itself approved? John Hume, the SDLP leader, said then that 'the gun has been taken out of Irish politics forever,' and the exultant erroneous headline in the [London] Daily Express was 'IRA give up guns at last.'''

That ''at last'' is poignant for two reasons: Even then it was the umpteenth time that the IRA had supposedly given up its guns, and of course it had done no such thing. Nor will it do so. The IRA — or, technically, its consigliere wing, Sinn Fein — is in government precisely because it possesses weapons and regularly threatens to use them if its demands are not accepted.

The ''peace process'' long ago lost any connection with peace as generally understood. It is now merely a euphemism for a policy of surrender-by-installments to IRA terrorism — in particular its threat to resume the bombing of London. What is happening today in Ireland is very similar to what happened in Germany in the 1920s and '30s. Fascist violence is the main force driving politics.

Sectarian private armies rule the streets, battling each other on occasion but principally intimidating decent law-abiding people in ''their own'' communities. The governments are themselves so intimidated that they now side with the terrorists against the law-abiding. Yet however generous and shameful the concessions, the terrorists never give up terrorism and transform themselves into democratic politicians. They simply demand fresh concessions — and they get them.

In practice the two governments and the IRA are now accomplices. What the voters vote for is secondary to what the IRA demands. So both governments, sometimes supported by Washington, lean heavily on the Unionists to swallow the necessary concessions. Of course, this cannot be admitted. So lying is built into the peace process. Because it would collapse if the IRA were to break the cease-fire, London and Dublin have ruled that murdering certain classes of people (dissident Catholics, informers, petty criminals) does not constitute a breach of the cease-fire.

Reporters are not immune to this inversion of values. ''Hard-liners'' is now used by the American and British media to refer to those politicians — generally Unionists and Protestants — who insist that murderers should surrender their weapons and renounce violence permanently before being allowed to become (or remain) government ministers. Those who argue that terrorist-ministers should remain in office as long as they promise to think about ''decommissioning'' weapons and abandoning violence at some unspecified date are described in more favorable terms such as ''moderate'' or ''peace-minded.'' When striving especially hard to be fair-minded, the media will refer to both groups as ''the extremes.''

The biggest lie of all is the phrase ''peace process.'' What it means in practice is the appeasement of the IRA, which has gone to the point where the two governments cannot bring themselves even to consider forceful resistance to terrorism. And while that is so, fascism rules, OK?

This originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.