MAKING PEACE.

• Author: Barbash, Fred
• Position: Review

MAKING PEACE By George J. Mitchell Knopf, $24

How George Mitchell helped the Irish put "the troubles" behind them

In Making Peace, George Mitchell recalls a tense day in 1998 when haggling between the British and Irish governments held up the conclusion to the Northern Ireland peace talks, which he was chairing. The crucial deadline loomed, the drumroll had begun, when the bad news came that the two governments were stalled.

Mitchell knew the press would insist on knowing what was going wrong and who was responsible. He was taken aback when officials from Dublin and London asked him to take the rap and accept full responsibility for the delay--so they didn't get blamed. With great angst (the former senate majority leader, as those of us who've covered him know, is a serious straight arrow, unaccustomed to lying or even fibbing), he and his two co-peace makers agreed to go out and dissemble. "We understood," he writes, that "absorbing blame was one of the reasons we were there."

In saying that, Mitchell pinpoints the real function of the three-member international commission he headed, which ultimately helped produce Northern Ireland's Good Friday Agreement last year. This was not really mediation; or shuttle diplomacy; or Holbrookean head-knocking. The Mitchell commission essentially provided cover for the politicians in the region. It shielded them from the consequences of doing the right thing, which meant shedding encrusted principles and repositioning, while retaining their dignity--and their constituencies. Concessions which would have been impossible if proffered to the enemy could be effectively laundered through Mitchell and his colleagues, who would, when necessary, "absorb the blame."

We forgive him for fibbing. We instead congratulate George Mitchell for his role in Northern Ireland. He is a tremendous hero, in ways most Americans have yet to recognize, in part because the Norwegians foolishly left his name off when they gave the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 to the leaders of the two largest Catholic and Protestant political parties who helped negotiate the agreement. Mitchell, who had retired from the senate and turned down such plums as an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, was a special advisor to the president on Northern Ireland in December, 1995 when the White House relayed the request from the governments of Britain and Ireland asking him to chair a committee of three, including a retired Canadian general and a former...