The IRA cessation, continued

Key sentences from a couple of today's comment pieces that you might not otherwise see, behind subscription in today's Wall Street Journal (Slugger O'Toole remains the most complete collection of links):

An editorial:

What is clear is that the IRA's road to oblivion only began when the community which it claimed to represent finally had enough, when the IRA's fellow-travelers in the mainstream political establishment finally turned their back, and when the wider world -- the "experts," the media -- finally stopped indulging IRA behavior with explanations and excuses. It's a lesson worth remembering as the world confronts terrorists elsewhere.

Again this tricky business of slotting the Provos into the G-SAVE. On the opinion page, Lionel Shriver, who seems to have acquired the niche of being the WSJ's woman in Belfast:

Last week's statement still insisted, "[T]he armed struggle was entirely legitimate." Thus the IRA is bloody-minded to the end. Yet both sides of this obscenely petty conflict got caught up in a raw power contest whose ferocity was grotesquely disproportionate to the trifling border dispute at issue. Looking back on the last 37 years, the Northern Irish of both religions should feel -- even more than sorrowful -- ashamed.

This is one of the stranger passages we've read recently -- leaving aside its broader negation of the roles of history, culture, identity and religion in the conflict, it doesn't sit at all well with the bi-polar, IRA-a-subset-of-GSAVE perspective of the editorial. Ms Shriver wasn't the only pundit giving the inverse curate's egg ("bad in parts") to the Provos, but to avoid having to attend a meeting of Bloggers Anonymous, we'll have to leave that discussion for later.