Tories on terrorism

There is a stupefying piece in today's Independent by the senior Conservative and former Shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Ancram. Ancram criticises the Prime Minister for referring to an 'arc of extremism', and argues against the notion that terrorism can be defeated militarily:

As we learned in Northern Ireland, terrorism can be contained by military action, but it cannot be defeated by it. In the end, you have to start talking, not necessarily with fanatical leaders who are beyond dialogue, but with those who support them and the communities that give them shelter.

It is not easy. For a short time in 1995 I was ostracised by the Ulster Unionists as "contaminated" when I opened discussions with Sinn Fein/IRA. Such dialogue can never be even remotely seen to condone terrorism, but it can begin to explore ways out of it. We talked and so did the IRA, because after 30 years of "troubles" there could be no military winners.

The ubiquity of this sentiment does not mitigate the mindlessness of its historical revisionism. The decision to open talks with Sinn Fein/IRA was a political choice, not a historical inevitability. The alternative would have been to treat terrorism not as a political issue but purely as a security issue. The second course is the one that I favour, as a pragmatic strategy for dealing with political violence. Rather than match a suspension of violence with political concessions, my strategy would make no concessions at all till an organisation had definitively abandoned violence and accepted constitutional politics (much as the old Official IRA became the Workers' Party). Holding this strategy and never deviating from it is the best way to convince terrorists to abandon their struggle and deter others from joining the cause, because we thereby convince them that they will lose and that their liberty will be short-lived.

Ancram is similarly historically illiterate in claiming the Irish experience as evidence for the efficacy of his approach. When Roy Mason, one of the finest ministers in postwar British political history, became Northern Ireland Secretary in 1976, he explicitly ruled out political measures to try to resolve the conflict, and promised to roll up the IRA "like a tube of toothpaste". There is no question but that his approach was effective. As the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft noted in The Telegraph on Mason's 80th birthday in 2004:

Stating that there is no political solution in Ulster has been called "really a Unionist position in disguise", and in some senses the truth of that should be acknowledged - as long as those who say so accept that, logically and by the same token, what is called "the search for a political solution" is really a Sinn Fein position in disguise.

All of that was intuitively grasped by Mason when he turned away from a "political solution" and set out to govern Northern Ireland with justice for all; with equality before the law; and, crucially, with republican terrorism treated as a security problem, and nothing else. Instead of the later conventional wisdom that IRA was the answer rather than the problem and that violence could be contained by propitiating it (which would be tried and experimentally falsified), and instead of any particularly new military tactics, Mason merely applied existing means for the resolute pursuit of terrorism. As a result he could soon record that, "We were without question hurting the IRA."

His years in Ulster saw more terrible atrocities, among them the IRA's special achievement in burning to death 12 party-goers at La Mon House Hotel. And yet terrorist violence was contained and diminished. In 1976 there were 297 deaths in the province; in the next three years the figures were 112, 81, 113 and it was an IRA man who acknowledged that "we were almost beaten by Mason".

Ancram remarks sententiously that "there can be no secure Israel without a permanent cessation of violence by Hizbollah", and appears to believe this requires negotiations on the part of others with Hizbollah. He might have referred to the fact that Hizbollah was forced to reassess its strategy of suicide terrorism - a technique that it had initiated in the early 1980s - on realising that it wasn't working: Israel kept inflicting heavy losses in response.

In locating an "arc of extremism", Tony Blair understands better than any other statesman, at home or abroad, the issues in combating terrorism. To stymie terrorism, those who sponsor and support it must be confronted. In the background, we have the voice of the Conservative Party: soft on crime and soft on the ideological causes of crime.

UPDATE: One of my regular correspondents, Dan Hardie, knows a lot about a lot of things, including the politics of Northern Ireland. He makes a point that I very largely agree with, and thus ought to have said myself, especially in the context of this post:

If you're going to laud the firmness, dedication to democratic principles, vision etc of Tony Blair, Northern Ireland is probably the worst place to start. (Sierra Leone or Kosovo seem to me to make rather better examples.) Sinn Fein/IRA wanted a peace deal in the mid-90s: they had been worn down militarily everywhere, including even South Armagh. The arrival of Trimble as Unionist leader in '96 was the best thing that had happened to constitutional unionism in a very long time - he had long outgrown his Vanguard period and was clearly democratic and non-sectarian.

Dan refers to several characteristics of Labour's policy in Northern Ireland that exemplify the worst aspects of Blairism: failure to observe the principle of equality before the law (e.g. an exhaustive inquiry into Bloody Sunday, but nothing about unpunished IRA killings such as Enniskillen); an economy dependent on state employment schemes; frivolous ministerial appointments (notably Mo Mowlam); ingratiation with local 'community leaders' (recall her continually addressing Martin McGuinness, in a bugged telephone conversation, as 'babe'); failure to work with constitutional parties, thereby assisting their eclipse by extremists; unwillingness to confront the US in requesting extradition of terrorist suspects and requiring an end to the practice whereby Sinn Fein solicits contributions from US citizens; and "an addiction to unpleasant and potentially dangerous politics-as-aesthetics gestures (the operationally justified decision to knock down the Maze being ruined by the decision to preserve the hospital block where a number of killers starved themselves to death, which will mean that Sinn Fein and their American supporters will have a standing memorial to their warped picture of themselves as hopeless victims of the British state)".

Dan concludes:

Of course I don't want to be the only man on earth proclaiming that Northern Ireland now is in a worse state than it was in 1972 or 1981. It's not. But the settlement that has taken shape under Tony Blair is so much worse than the settlement that could have been achieved, and would have been achieved by a man like Roy Mason. The 'peace' in Northern Ireland was real, but distinctly vulnerable, in 1967 or 1924, and the same is true now. The reasons for Blair's failure are not limited to Northern Ireland, but have their roots in some pretty well-established failings of his.