David Frum's Diary - MORAL CLARITY
nationalreview.com
The London Times is reporting that the Bush administration has just banned Sinn Fein fundraising in the United States.
This decision constitutes only the latest blow against the IRA’s civilian front group. Last week, President Bush refused to meet with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams on his St. Patrick’s Day US tour. “At the White House, Gerry Adams is now regarded with the same sort of disdain as Yasser Arafat,” a senior administration official told the Daily Telegraph.
In the 1990s, the US was drawn into the same moral morass in northern Ireland as in the Middle East. Terrorists were treated as acceptable partners in hopes of cajoling them into chaning their ways. Instead, the terrorists decided that terrorism pays.
Now suddenly the Bush doctrine is arriving in Ireland – and Irish people are massively turning against the IRA and its Sinn Fein accomplices. My friend Dean Godson gave the background in an important piece in last week’s Wall Street Journal:
"Is the Irish republican movement becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland, a state within a state? The southern Irish mainstream fears as much, which explains why it is turning on the movement -- consisting of the Irish Republican Army and its political Siamese twin, Sinn Fein -- with a vengeance. Having afforded Gerry Adams and his cohorts the space in which to mend their ways after 30 years of 'armed struggle' against British rule, Middle Ireland has finally lost patience with the burgeoning criminal empire of the Provisionals.
"It all started to go wrong after the abortive attempt to revive Northern Ireland's peace process last November. The talks faltered, in part, because of Gerry Adams's refusal to sign up to a form of words crafted by the Irish and British governments which would have obliged his organization to forswear criminality. Then came the robbery in Belfast in late December, when nearly $50 million disappeared from the vaults of the Northern Bank -- the largest heist in the history of these islands.
"Despite Sinn Fein/IRA denials, the Irish and British police rapidly fingered the republican movement as the malefactor. Of particular significance was the response of the Irish premier, Bertie Ahern. Mr. Ahern did not indulge in the abiding fiction of the peace process that Mr. Adams -- as Sinn Fein's political talking-head -- knew nothing about what the hard men of the IRA were doing. Instead, Mr. Ahern expressed his profound sense of 'betrayal' that Mr. Adams and his main confederate, Martin McGuinness, knew all along about the preparations for the raid -- even as they were supposedly negotiating an end to paramilitarism.
"Worse was yet to come. In January, a Belfast man, Robert McCartney, was murdered following a dispute with a senior republican in a bar. Although a Catholic and Sinn Fein supporter, Mr. McCartney was set upon by a gang of senior Provisionals. He was held down; his abdomen was slit from navel to breast-bone; his jugular vein was severed; and an eye was gouged out. But although there were nearly 70 witnesses, such is the code of IRA-enforced omertà in Northern Ireland's Catholic ghettoes that no one initially came forward to talk. A defensive IRA ... compounded their error by offering to shoot the perpetrators."
McCartney’s sisters have since launched a heroic campaign to bring his killers to justice – and their movement has evoked a large response in all Ireland, south and north. On St. Patrick’s Day, it will be the McCartney women and not Adams who meet with President Bush. A rattled IRA has responded first by offering to kill the killers itself. Now it has reversed itself: Yesterday, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuiness delivered an unmistakeable warning to the sisters not to “cross the line.”
The IRA has seen off – and killed off – challengers before. But there is something unusual in the air in this year 2005. Ukraine, Iraq, Lebanon – could it be that it is Ireland’s turn next? |
