It's Saint Patrick's week in Ireland -- it's a week now, not just a day (the 17th). And that means that all Irish politicians, North and South, are not in Ireland. Most of them are in the USA, although some of the Oirish VIPs will be carefully working their schedules to ensure that they make it to Cheltenham for the race meeting. But amongst the Irish suits in the USA for the week is Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble. And he spent a good portion of Monday making a shameless pitch to the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy that he's their man in Northern Ireland. He was at the research nerve centre of the VRWC, the Heritage Foundation -- we're waiting for a transcript to appear. But based on what we're seeing on TV, here are the key points:
1. He's sticking to the Aznar-PP line that there's an ETA angle to the Madrid bombs. He needs that to fit his slams of the IRA into Dubya's War on Terror, because there are some historical linkages between the IRA and ETA. But keeping his "to be sure" options open, he read verbatim a Sunday Independent article that we linked to previously alleging that the IRA disseminated the mobile phone bomb technology that was used in the Madrid attacks, whether by ETA or al Qaeda.
2. He bent the statistics to show that the IRA has remained the most active terrorist group in NI. Here how's he did it -- the IRA have murdered at least one person in every year of the peace process (6 years in total). Nice choice of indicator for most active -- because it steps around the simpler indicator of total deaths during this time, which would point to the Real IRA or loyalist groups as more active.
3. He threw some red meat to his VRWC hosts, bashing Bill Clinton's approach to NI and saying that Dubya has been better, which was billed as a critique of John Kerry as well, who had said as much. The only supporting argument provided was that Clinton had told the Unionists to work within the peace process institutions in 1999 even in the absence of full weapons decommissioning; Bill noted that there was always an option to walk out if the decommissioning did not happen. We were lead to believe that Dubya would have advised something different. But even if it was bad advice, no-one made Trimble follow it, and of course the option that Bill described remains on the table.
So Trimble has clearly picked his horse in the November US elections. Given that he's still on the Aznar horse in the Spanish elections, we think that's a good sign for John Kerry.
1. He's sticking to the Aznar-PP line that there's an ETA angle to the Madrid bombs. He needs that to fit his slams of the IRA into Dubya's War on Terror, because there are some historical linkages between the IRA and ETA. But keeping his "to be sure" options open, he read verbatim a Sunday Independent article that we linked to previously alleging that the IRA disseminated the mobile phone bomb technology that was used in the Madrid attacks, whether by ETA or al Qaeda.
2. He bent the statistics to show that the IRA has remained the most active terrorist group in NI. Here how's he did it -- the IRA have murdered at least one person in every year of the peace process (6 years in total). Nice choice of indicator for most active -- because it steps around the simpler indicator of total deaths during this time, which would point to the Real IRA or loyalist groups as more active.
3. He threw some red meat to his VRWC hosts, bashing Bill Clinton's approach to NI and saying that Dubya has been better, which was billed as a critique of John Kerry as well, who had said as much. The only supporting argument provided was that Clinton had told the Unionists to work within the peace process institutions in 1999 even in the absence of full weapons decommissioning; Bill noted that there was always an option to walk out if the decommissioning did not happen. We were lead to believe that Dubya would have advised something different. But even if it was bad advice, no-one made Trimble follow it, and of course the option that Bill described remains on the table.
So Trimble has clearly picked his horse in the November US elections. Given that he's still on the Aznar horse in the Spanish elections, we think that's a good sign for John Kerry.
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