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Table Talk - what Churchill called "jaw-jaw"

Thursday, October 25, 2007

It felt like the end of an era. It was a good feeling, if tinged with an odd bit of nostalgia. Many Irish-American journalists, diplomats, political activists, business-people and academics all came together in New York this week to honor a man who’d been critical to setting a firm seal on “the end of Europe’s longest-running conflict”.

That was how Northern Ireland’s historic peace settlement of this year was being described. And in saying “longest-running” those present meant something like six or seven centuries of conflict, depending on how they read the history.

The honoree was Peter Hain (far right above) who as Britain’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland effectively signed away his "Viceroy from London" role in that long-embattled province, by handing authority over to a new local power-sharing executive. This new government was formed - it’s worth saying since we are now steadily getting used to it - by an astonishing combination, of both hardline Protestants led by the redoubtable Ian Paisley (far left above) and the Irish Republican Army’s political wing Sinn Fein, led by Gerry Adams (pictured seated with Paisley - more on this curious picture later).

Hain’s own description of the power-transferring ceremony back in May was a “wouldn’t-ever-happen” day which did actually happen, and I enjoyed those moments with a special frisson of pleasure, as both a journalist who covered decades of Irish violence and one whose knowledge of Hain goes back to his very different role in 1970 as a crowd-stirring street protestor, against the injustices of apartheid. (He was raised in South Africa, but the protests were in exile, in London).

As Hain signed the official instrument devolving power to the Northern Irish, he said “rarely has a politician given up his power so willingly”. I couldn’t help then but think, as often, of another quasi-colonial arena of military occupation, and in this case of another viceroy figure; how very, very different, was the departure of the Bush Administration’s spectacularly inept Paul “Jerry” Bremer from the Iraqi scene.

The finessing of political agreements, and their public presentation, can sometimes be an arcane field of study, and I was entranced to learn in detail about the seating-plans for the first occasion that Paisley (long known as "Doctor No") and Adams would be seen in public together.

Paisley had refused to sit next to the former IRA man, preferring to have a table between them, as there always had been between their two parties’ delegations. Hain understandably wanted a photo-op that offered a clear “togetherness” shot.

Northern Ireland Office staffers were set to work on various permutations for a table configuration - table-shapes are a necessary professional specialty for negotiators’ back-up teams - and they included the appealing compromise of a table-end (above center) that was more diamond-shaped than rectangular.

Official photographers and the press pool finally got the required (if still awkwardly wide) two-shot.

SPEAKING OF QUASI-COLONIAL COMPARISONS WITH THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, I’ve been following, as one has to, the output of the White House’s favorite squawk-box, the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial & Opinion pages. I’ve been interested especially in their strident campaign against engaging in talks with Iran (as opposed to, for instance, simply bombing that country).

The pages have trundled out among others the Iranian commentator Amir Taheri - just as the White House itself has brought him in, among a group of “Iran experts” it chose, to brief the President himself - arguing that “calling for talks is just cheap talk ... talk of ‘constructive engagement’ is sure to encourage President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's intransigence”.

He sure knows his Iran, this Taheri. Trouble is, it may not be the real Iran. We should perhaps recall that he is the writer behind last year’s since-discredited story that Iran’s rulers were planning to make Jews wear distinctive clothing, and the wild claim that Iran’s UN Ambassador had in 1979 been a member of the hostage-seizing gang at the US Embassy. (That would be Javad Zarif, and during the hostage crisis Zarif was quietly working in California as Professor Dwight Simpson’s teaching assistant at San Francisco State University).

Taheri’s stand against talking with the Iran regime made me remember a Bush operative, Richard Armitage, who was Deputy Secretary of State during the current President’s first term, and no lilly-livered liberal – he is after all known for being, when playing hardball, an original source for the vengeful leakage of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. While discussing some basic elements of (as it were) “International Relations 101”, Armitage once opined: “We get a little lazy, I think, when we spend all our time as diplomats talking to our friends, and not to our enemies”.

THAT ESSENTIAL MESSAGE WAS REPEATED IN NEW YORK THIS WEEK, when Peter Hain alluded to his own recent writing on diplomacy, a monograph called Peacemaking in Northern Ireland: A Model for Conflict Resolution? - published after a forum at Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs (aka Chatham House). He reflected on the whole peace process as laid out in his writing, and said simply: “You have to talk to your enemies”.

Specifically he recalled: “When we first reached out to talk with the [Irish] Republicans, London was being bombed by the IRA. We shouldn’t forget that.”

As a successful negotiated outcome settles into place in Northern Ireland, and once-vicious violent rivals now haggle simply about water-charges and other such everyday public policy questions, we certainly shouldn’t forget that.