Talks with masked men; peace in our time?
The Guardian refers to it as Tony Blair’s one great unquestionable success; the attainment of peace in Northern Ireland. Great Hatred, Little Room, is a new book from senior Blair aide Jonathan Powell focusing on the heavy negotiations between Blair and the IRA, and follows in the footsteps of Alastair Campbell’s epic but gripping The Blair Years. Showcasing as it does one of the great diplomatic success stories of the modern era, Powell’s book offers renewed hope for peacemaking, and serves as a reminder of what can be achieved through talking to your enemies and trying desperately and doggedly to work towards common ground. At one stage, as The Guardian breathlessly reported today, Blair sought to engage in meetings with masked IRA leaders if need be in order to keep the peace process alive. One wonders where this determination to forge peace through diplomatic means went to around the time that the decision to go all the way in Iraq was made, without the requisite planning or indeed a robust moral and legal justification.
Powell also quite bravely has come out in support of talking with the Taliban and Al’Qaida. Perhaps it is symptomatic of the action-oriented political mood of the moment that someone supporting such a position is newsworthy in itself:
Western governments must talk to terror groups including al-Qaida and the Taliban if they hope to secure a long-term halt to their campaigns of violence, according to the man who for more than a decade was Tony Blair’s most influential aide and adviser.
…
Powell said: “There’s nothing to say to al-Qaida and they’ve got nothing to say to us at the moment, but at some stage you’re going to have to come to a political solution as well as a security solution. And that means you need the ability to talk.”
The great danger in governments reaching out to groups like Al’Qaeda as essentially “equals” across a bargaining table is that it offers an air of legitimacy to them. Effectively, by extending a hand of negotiation, there is no doubting that we would be sending an implicit message that engaging in terrorist activity and defying international law is a way to get a seat at the big table. Nor can the situation with Northern Ireland be reasonably compared to the situation the Western world faces with terrorist cells draped in the banner of fundamentalist Islam. The potential threats that the world faces in relation to global terrorism are amorphous, decentralised, and constantly shifting. In the same way that it doesn’t really make sense for governments to negotiate with a small number of “representative” murderers in an effort to stamp out murder in society, negotiating with a representative group of terrorists in an effort to stamp out terrorism is clearly not going to prove to be a final solution to the problem.
The path towards a lasting peace lies with uniting the Western world with the moderate and secular Islamic world against extremists who defy the rule of law. The relative few who act on their grievances in violent ways should not be given the time of day.
ELSEWHERE: Seamus has another angle on the Powell book over at Club Troppo.
Tags: Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell, Northern Ireland, Tony Blair
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on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 12:30 am and is filed under UK Politics.
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