President Bush recently honoured some Cherokee Indians who had served as signallers in the Pacific during the second World War. Cherokee is one of the most complex, highly inflected languages in the world, tonal as well as verbal, complete with vast gorse-thickets of conjugations and case-endings. However, not content with this impenetrability, Cherokee radio operators themselves created a military version of their language; thus this small community of Indians spoke a language known to no outsiders, and which Japanese monitors were completely unable to break.
When it comes to analysing the Northern peace process, I know exactly how the Japanese monitors felt, their earphones stuck on their ears while strange whale-like squawks, or squeals interspersed with chunks of concrete consonants could equally spell an attack by a marine assault force wielding flame-throwers or an order for more carbon paper for the divisional clerks.
On the day that four Sinn FΘin MPs were elected to Westminster, an IRA unit, some 20 strong, launched a well-planned and audacious robbery in Belfast docks. If it had gone wrong, and the security forces had interrupted it, it would have gone very wrong indeed: the IRA men were heavily armed, and the firefight which would have resulted would have been catastrophic for the peace process.
Indian rope trick
So all right; answer me this. Why, on such a day, the day that Sinn FΘin-IRA began to pronounce the obsequies over the SDLP, would the entire peace process project be emperilled for the sake of a single armed robbery? Does it tell us something about this curious beast, the republican movement? That it really does believe it has mastered the Indian rope trick of saying one thing and doing the complete opposite, and no one will notice? And the almost complete and utter absence of any remark from most commentators upon this extraordinary dichotomy, unparalleled within any democracy since the 1930s, suggests that it's right.
Meanwhile we have the mounting and identical farce of decommissioning of weaponry, which, if you remember, was meant to accompany the talks which finally led to the Good Friday Agreement. Unionists had initially demanded that decommissioning should take place as a pre-condition, but faced with pressure from the US, British and Irish governments, had agreed: disarmament to accompany talks, those talks to be on the basis of the Mitchell Principles.
Peaceful means
The Mitchell Principles, ah the Mitchell Principles: how they bring a fond tear to the eye, rather as does the sight of a vintage car or the sound of a piece of music from one's childhood. They required participants in talks to be committed to democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues, the total and verifiable disarmament of all paramilitary organisations, the renunciation of all force or the threat of force by anyone for political purposes, a commitment to political means only to resolve political differences, and a duty to take effective action against punishment beatings.
And so the various party leaders, including Sinn FΘin-IRA's representatives, all agreed to renounce violence, and to disarm, and very possibly to hop to the moon with a wheelbarrow full of bricks on their back, for all the meaning such avowals had.
For it wasn't just that the IRA had no intention of disarming then, or indeed even now. It was re-arming, buying guns from Florida, and later from Central Europe. Two months ago, following the effective division of Northern Ireland into a neat DUP-Sinn FΘin duopoly, with non-sectarian democrats the increasingly threatened filling in a very ferocious-looking sandwich, the IRA revealed its liberal version of the Mitchell Principles with the theft of over 100 shotguns and rifles from an arms dealer in Westmeath.
You can read commentaries galore on the peace process, and how close the IRA might soon be to decommissioning, without a single reference to what the IRA has actually been doing - which is topping up its arsenals in the largest arms raid in the Republic since 1940, and topping up its electoral funds with the largest armed robbery in Northern Ireland's history. It is as if talks and terrorism exist in parallel universes.
And just to remind us that the IRA hasn't gone away you know, as Gerry Adams famously did just six years ago, last month it was probably responsible for shooting dead a Dublin criminal, Seamus Hogan, in an early piece of election campaigning which will probably go down very well in working-class areas. This brings to about a score the number of men it has killed in its own idiosyncratic interpretation of Mitchell. And it gets away with these deeds because democrats still fondly hope that soon it will do better, nobler democratic things.
"Youthful vigour"
"The image of the party was of unparalleled activity, drive and youthful vigour...Many of the speakers were now of good quality, hand-picked, well-trained, centrally-controlled but able to latch onto to and exploit any local issues, as well as putting across the unchanging basic message.. were increasingly...on the front page of newspapers ..."
That, not being Cherokee, is clear enough. It is Ian Kershaw's analysis of how the Nazis transformed themselves to "democrats" in the 1930 election for the Reichstag, even while the Brownshirts were still smashing limbs on street corners. But Hitler, of course, could not have gone anywhere, unless democrats had first allowed the institutions of democracy to be deeply damaged, and had then invited him into government to shore up the very institutions he had helped to subvert.
Is this, in any way, even faintly familiar?