DON'T SAVE THE IRA - OR, WHAT IS "GLOBAL REACH?" I had never put forth the effort required to learn about the issues underlying the conflict in Northern Ireland, and thus my thoughts on the matter were limited to incohate feelings of "terrorism bad - peace good."
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, I thought it might be a good idea for Britian, with the U.S.' encouragement, to mount a campaign to utterly exterminate the IRA. It wasn't that I thought the IRA had anything to do with September 11. Rather, irrelevance to September 11 was the point; in a war on terrorism, it would help to make the point that white European terrorists were just as worthy of destruction as Islamic fundamentalists. As Charles Krauthammer said regarding the inclusion of north Korea in Bush's "axis of evil," it would have been the "equivalent of strip-searching an 80-year-old Irish nun at airport security: It is our defense against ethnic profiling." Not long after September 11, though, there were signs that the IRA had been scared straight, quite unlike the Palestinians.
Now it appears that the IRA has resumed their activities which make them subject to President Bush's declaration of war against "terrorist groups of global reach."
Apparently they have been training Colombian and Palestinian terrorists in the fine arts of bomb-making.