Dumping Saint Patrick for Saint George

Even though this year's White House guest list for St Patrick's Day will be very different from last year's, Americans can rest assured that many species of the migratory birds of March will be putting in their usual appearance on this side of the Atlantic. In addition to the Dublin VIPs, the op-ed pages of Dubya's preferred organs will feature their annual drawing of equivalences between Northern Ireland and the Global War on Terror (hereafter GWoT). Stepping up to the plate in today's Wall Street Journal is Dean Godson.

As usual (and the WSJ really needs to reconsider this policy, at least for opinion pieces), the article is subscriber only [*but see below]. But the gist is easy to communicate. Godson accurately takes note of the changed attitude over the last 3 months to the IRA, especially in the Republic, and if one just extracted his description of these events -- the Northern Bank job, the murder of Robert McCartney, and the toughening of anti-IRA rhetoric by the Republic's politicians, you'd have a perfectly respectable account of the current political dynamic vis-a-vis the Troubles.

But Godson couldn't stop there -- it had to become an out-and-out love letter to the home office of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy. And given Godson's own impeccable ties to the VRC (.co.uk), we shouldn't be surprised; check out these mentions of him by Canadian hack David Frum, and this profile showing fine VRC credentials. Hence his two themes (1) NI is just like the Middle East -- and indeed could benefit from being in Dubya's Greater Middle East Co-Prosperity Sphere, and (2) it's all Bill Clinton's fault.

Item (1): Is the Irish republican movement becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland, a state within a state? ... Sinn Fein/IRA is a viciously anti-American movement whose closest foreign collaborators include the PLO (Arafat is a particular hero to republicans); the Colombian FARC (to whom it has supplied urban warfare techniques in exchange for cash to fund its rise to power in the Irish Republic); Castro's Cuba; and Hugo Chávez's Venezuela (where many IRA men, including a close relative of Gerry Adams, hang out).

Significantly, one of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's lieutenants gave an interview recently to Time magazine in which he cited Sinn Fein/IRA's success as the model for the Iraqi insurgents' admixture of political and military action. [indeed, we had blogged about this interview and were surprised it did not get more attention -- BOBW]

Sinn Fein/IRA was in the vanguard of opposition to giving U.S. military aircraft landing rights at Shannon International Airport during the Iraq war

Item (2): But a key responsibility for this disastrous fudge lies with Bill Clinton and figures in his administration such as Anthony Lake, Nancy Soderberg, Sandy Berger and Jim Steinberg ... when his [Clinton's] close friend Tony Blair suspended Ulster's [sic] provincial parliament in February 2000 in order to punish the republicans for their failure to disarm -- as they had promised to do in George Mitchell's review of late 1999 -- Mr. Clinton conspicuously did not back the British prime minister.

And of course, having served the appetiser and main course so nicely, there's only one possible dessert:

Because the nationalist heartlands of Northern Ireland are still one of the few places in Western Europe that do not pass Natan Sharansky's "Town Square Test" of being able to say what you think of your rulers without fear of retribution. After years of cynical Realpolitik, Northern Ireland desperately needs a bit of Lebanese-style "people power" to loosen the grip of the thugs. Mr. Clinton's legacy to Ulster [sic] is a set of paramilitarized ethno-religious Bantustans; Mr. Bush's could yet be true freedom.

Note especially the pleasing reference to Dubya's favourite author, and the call for a Beirut-on-Lagan uprising with Dubya as its patron saint. This path to peace seems clear enough, and yet he has left out one thing -- whether Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, and Glenn Reynolds will find the Freedom(TM) women of Belfast sufficiently good-looking for repeated ogling from their TV screens.

*UPDATE 16 MARCH: We found a free link to Godson's article on a website with an odd set of concerns: local taxes and the Global War on Terror. Nearly as odd as this blog's range of issues.