Bill & Ted's Irish misadventure.

• Author: McMenamin, Michael

The Clinton administration's meddling has put Ireland on the road to becoming another Bosnia.

But it's not too late to change.

Bill Clinton's attempt to make peace in Northern Ireland blew up in his face on February 9, when the Irish Republican Army ended its 17-month cease-fire with a 1,000-pound bomb in the Canary Wharf area of London, injuring 43 and killing two. The main component of Clinton's initiative, inspired by Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy and commenced in 1994, was appeasement of the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein. By most accounts, Clinton and Kennedy were surprised and embarrassed by the IRA's betrayal. They should be embarrassed, but not surprised.

After the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton talked tough about anti-terrorist measures and the need for right-wing talk show hosts to tame their rhetoric. He has not applied a similar standard to the IRA or the head of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams. Unlike Adams, the talk show hosts have all explicitly renounced violence and those who perpetrate it. Since the IRA did its own imitation of Oklahoma City in London, Bill and Ted have maintained an appropriate, if uncharacteristic, silence on matters Irish.

Bill and Ted had their fun. Bill got a trip to Ireland, and both pretended for a time they were peacemakers. But now the fun is over, the body count is higher, and the fatal flaws in Clinton's Irish initiative remain for all to see. If it is not repudiated, either by Clinton himself or by a new American administration, it may forever stand as a milepost on the road to an Irish Bosnia, complete with ethnic cleansing in both Protestant and Catholic areas of Northern Ireland by the private armies of the IRA/Sinn Fein on the one hand and the equally violent Protestant/Unionist paramilitaries on the other. That is one of the more likely scenarios facing both Irelands today, especially if a) the Labor Party's Tony Blair becomes Britain's next prime minister; b) the IRA wins U.S. forgiveness by reinstating a temporary cease-fire and Clinton continues his appeasement of the IRA; c) the United States resumes, with Tony Blair's encouragement, its pressure on Britain to bring the "unreasonable" Ulster Protestants into line; and d) the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland terminate their own cease-fire and resume hostilities after seeing how successful violence can be against democratic governments who believe in the appeasement of political terrorism.

Clinton's policy in Northern Ireland - formulated in response to the 1993 bargain between Adams and John Hume, head of the largest Catholic party in Northern Ireland - is based on two dubious propositions. The first is that the "peace process" initiated by the Hume-Adams pact will lead to some form of Irish "unity," short of a 32-county republic, sufficient to persuade the IRA to decommission its weapons. The second is that the British will coerce the Ulster Protestants to accept whatever "unity" the IRA agrees to swallow and will actually stick around to suppress the inevitable violence from the Protestant/Unionist paramilitaries that will follow.

The first proposition is hopelessly naive and betrays a shocking ignorance of the origins and history of the IRA, whose bedfellows and allies in its near century-long trail of blood have included Imperial Germany, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, East Germany, the Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba, Basque terrorists, the PLO, and Gadhafi's Libya. The second proposition is equally naive and even more dangerous. Forget for a moment, as most people have, the implacable hostility of the Protestant paramilitaries, which killed nearly twice as many Catholics in 1992 as the IRA did Protestants. Consider, instead, that the second proposition assumes the British will do the right thing and not unilaterally leave Northern Ireland, something they have been trying to do, without success, since 1921. Trusting the British to do the right thing about Ireland - talk about the triumph of hope over experience. The British have, after all, been known simply to leave unpleasant situations, followed by sectarian violence and civil war on a large scale. Think India (and Pakistan) in 1947 and Palestine (and Israel) in 1948. On both occasions, Britain was led by a Labor government, as it likely will be again in the near future.

The IRA knows this about the British and, since the early 1970s, its political and military policies - which it continues to follow - have been designed to bring about just such a hasty departure and bloody outcome. Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein are key participants in this overall strategy. Any American government that doesn't recognize this doesn't know Ireland, doesn't know the IRA, doesn't know the Ulster Protestants, and is helping to bring an Irish Bosnia closer. The comparison with Bosnia is not far-fetched. Irish politicians, North and South, including John Hume, former Prime Minister Jack Lynch, and former Irish and U.N. diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien, have all forecast a bloodbath should the British pull out of Northern Ireland on short notice. The number of Catholic refugees who would flee from the North to the South has been projected at 250,000, more than 40 percent of Northern Ireland's Catholic population. To put that in perspective, consider that Ireland's total population is only about 3.5 million, compared to roughly 1.5 million - 900,000 Protestants and 600,000 Catholics - in the North. Consider also that support for IRA/Sinn Fein in regular elections is only 2 percent in the South and 10 percent in the North.

The United States does not have any vital interests at stake in Northern Ireland. But having meddled in Irish affairs for the past two years and made the situation worse, the U.S. government has a moral obligation to understand what went wrong and, perhaps, try to make amends. Exploring the origins, premises, goals, and likely consequences of the Clinton-Kennedy initiative may enable either Clinton or a new administration to fashion a policy toward Ireland that will contribute to a genuine peace, not the Orwellian one advocated by Gerry Adams, the IRA, and Sinn Fein, for whom the only acceptable peaceful result is an unlikely Protestant capitulation. The Clinton-Kennedy folly notwithstanding, the United States can play a useful role in the all-party talks that began in Northern Ireland on June 10 - if...