It was strange enough for the rest of us, but what did they make of it in Ballybinaby when they turned on their television sets to see Tony Blair shaking hands with Muammar Gadaffi, cementing a new alliance against terror?
Ballybinaby, for those who don’t know it, is the rural South Armagh redoubt of old-style republicanism where Tom “Slab” Murphy, millionaire bandit and chief of staff of the IRA, rules the roost. Like some Third World warlord he provides most of the local employment and levies “taxes” on smugglers using Larkin’s Road, which runs past his front door.
Murphy’s mind must have slipped back to the day in August 1985 when he stood on Clogga Strand in Co Wicklow to take delivery of 300 boxes of Libyan arms, a gift from Gadaffi. They included AK-47 rifles, pistols, Semtex, grenades and heavy machine guns. It was enough to supply the IRA for 30 years; Murphy needed a tractor to haul it ashore.
He may have remembered Colonel Nasser Ashour, the Libyan intelligence officer whom he first met a few weeks after Constable Yvonne Fletcher was murdered by gunmen firing from the Libyan People’s Bureau in London.
Now Murphy and, Gadaffi, Ashour’s boss, are allies of Blair in the war against terror. There is a parallel: the IRA keeps the dissidents in line while Gadaffi opposes the militant Islamists to help secure the West’s oil supply. They may be sonsabitches, to paraphrase the Americans’ description of Latin American dictators they propped up, but they are now our sonsabitches.
The IRA’s weapons deal with Libya worked out well for both. The IRA was kept in business as a result. The weaponry helped sway hardliners to back the leadership’s move towards politics and secured Murphy’s power base.
Gadaffi later won brownie points in the West by giving the British government an inventory of what he supplied to the IRA. Murphy and the IRA are still using the same guns to buy political influence by demanding concessions in return for decommissioning them. And that’s not counting the concessions they won when the guns were in use.
They were well worth the £100,000 in used notes with which Murphy personally paid Adrian Hopkins, the captain who smuggled them, in a Dundalk bar.
“The world is changing and we have got to do everything we possibly can to tackle the security threat that faces us,” Blair told Gadaffi, his upper lip so stiff and his smile so thin that it might have been Botoxed on. Murphy, like the beaming Gadaffi, could hardly have disagreed with a word the prime minster said.
Winston Churchill summed up these situations very well. When he concluded a pact with Stalin against Nazi Germany he observed that if Hitler had invaded hell he would have felt it his duty to give the devil a favourable mention, at the very least, on the floor of the House of Commons. Of course, once the German threat was vanquished, Churchill changed his tune and was an enthusiastic advocate of the cold war. An iron curtain had descended over Europe, he warned.
Realpolitik dictates that yesterday’s pariahs are often today’s allies. More disturbingly, if a dictator or a terrorist can hang on to power long enough, democratic politicians — who come and go every few years — will eventually shift their positions to accommodate him.
The West tried to isolate Gadaffi when he toppled King Idris in a military coup that he claimed was a socialist revolution 30 years ago. He stuck to power, resisting their pressure, and now they need him. In the changed climate of the 21st century, Gadaffi’s Libyan Jamahiriya looks like one of the most secular regimes in the region and possibly a more stable source of oil than Saudi Arabia.
Iraq used to look like that too. Saddam Hussein was favoured for holding the Shi’ite extremists, as they were then regarded, in check and keeping Iran at bay. Donald Rumsfeld used to visit him; he was a friend and client of the West which armed and supplied his long, futile war with Iran.
Things changed when he invaded Kuwait and it became clear he was trying to wage a war of conquest that would give him a stranglehold on the oil supplies of the region and allow him to hold the West to ransom. That led to the first Gulf war and sanctions.
In Afghanistan, too, Osama Bin Laden was our sonofabitch when he was fighting the Russians. It was then the Soviets who were accusing America of sponsoring terrorism by supplying Osama, the Taliban and their cohorts with money, weapons and advisers with which to topple the relatively liberal pro-Soviet regime of Mohammad Najibullah. Yesterday’s freedom fighters are today’s Frankenstein’s monster.
Now world politics has been moved around to take account of the new dispensation. Bin Laden’s talk of restoring the Muslim empire, expelling the Americans from Saudi Arabia and taking over the place was once regarded as just rhetoric. Since September 11, it is taken seriously.
The decision to take Saddam out followed Bin Laden’s attack on the twin towers, even though the two men were not linked ideologically or practically. After September 11, as we now know, western governments began to say that Saddam was actually doing the things that they feared he might. “No terror state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein,” said Rumsfeld in September 2002.
“Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.”
We now know that was bunkum but it doesn’t mean that there is no rhyme, reason, or consistency in the attitude of the West and of democratic governments towards dictators and terrorists. International politics is usually a matter of choosing between unpalatable alternatives and it is almost always a search for stability.
After September 11 it seems America wanted to project its power in the Middle East and create a new world order in which Osama Bin Laden’s virulent brand of Islamic extremism would be contained. The aim of setting up Iraq as a stable democracy and ally was not the war’s stated aim but it was there in the background, and may yet be achieved.
The invasion of Iraq, even if it wasn’t justified by weapons of mass destruction, did change the world order. American troops are now in reach of any country in the Middle East and former “problem” states as diverse as Iran, Libya and Pakistan are being brought on board for a new relationship with the West.
All the same, how will it look in Ballybinaby, and all the other places where tinpot dictators cling on to power in their fiefdoms across the globe? The lesson they draw from it won’t necessarily be a moral one; it may well be “stick to your guns”.
