To End the Conflict Stop Feeding It

I disagree with Richard Haass’s remarks at Project Syndicate concerning Northern Ireland. Here’s the meat of it:

Some of what explains the accord’s success is specific to Northern Ireland. But other factors have broader relevance, providing guidance for approaching conflicts elsewhere, even the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The most fundamental lesson is that diplomacy can succeed only where and when other tools cannot. Successive British prime ministers – Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair – created a context that by the late 1990s gave diplomacy a chance. This required two things: First, the UK introduced sufficient security forces so that those in Northern Ireland who sought to shoot their way to power could not succeed. Violence could not be prevented from disrupting lives, but it was not allowed to create political facts.

Everything he says in the balance of the piece might well be true but he leaves out an important development. In the late 1990s the IRA was largely being financed by private contributions from the Irish diaspora, particularly Irish Americans. You couldn’t go into an Irish pub here in Chicago without somebody passing the can for contributions at some point. Everybody knew where the contributions went.

But then disaster struck on September 11, 2001. The U. S. experienced a major terrorist attack of its own and nearly overnight the contributions dried up. Terrorist attacks just weren’t that romantic any more.

When the contributions dried up the bargaining table looked a lot more attractive.