It would take the pen of Evelyn Waugh to begin to do justice to the Grand Guignol unfolding in the North.
Only he could have painted a picture in which the US State Department and No 10 Downing Street join the Department of Foreign Affairs in implementing the Sinn FΘin-IRA strategy of war by other means. Only such a mordant observer of human life could have described how, at the urging of the US, the two sovereign governments on this island released all their terrorist prisoners for nothing, absolutely nothing, not even an empty promise or a rusty pike in return.
Waugh could joyously have described how the Shinners had misled a posturing poltroon like Blair and with glee conveyed how the Department of Foreign Affairs could, in all its supercilious vanity, obediently have followed a Sinn FΘin agenda. But not even he could convincingly have decribed how the US government, with the greatest intelligence-gathering service in world history at its disposal, could have been duped into supporting a gang of murderers who were noisy supporters and paramilitary allies of that government's deadliest enemies.
Narco-terrorists
No, no: I can see that old boy, bile washing through his lymphatic glands, and rancour bubbling in his inkwell, vainly trying to describe how Sinn FΘin had bewitched the State Department into supporting IRA policies, one after the other, culminating in the destruction of the RUC, the bravest and most incorruptible police force in the world. And in return, a grateful IRA promptly gave military assistance to the very people the State Department loathed most in its entire hemisphere, the narco-terrorists of Colombia. No, no, such folly is beyond the power of fiction; it is possible only in the real life of the peace process.
And comparable follies have repeatedly been evident in this peace process, and have been minded throughout by a sneering praetorian guard of professional peace processers, who denounce anyone critical of these follies as war-mongers and stooges of MI5.
But of all these idiocies, none seems to have a greater potential for long-term disaster than the destruction of the RUC and its replacement by a police service whose primary duty is the enforcement of human rights.
This is imbecilic, 1960s peace & lurve, in all their vacuousness, being adorned in uniform and given command over the most turbulent streets in Europe. As a concept, it is the very intellectual and practical opposite of true policing. Police forces throughout the world do not depend for their effectiveness on an enforcement of universal human human rights, but on a systematic and discriminate denial of them. A police officer's first duty is the rule of lawful order: and such order can be maintained only by a selective curtailment of liberties. Every arrest is a denial of someone's liberty. Every traffic cone, every detour, every car-parking restriction, every crowd-controlling measure, every re-routed march, every closed street, every speed limit: each one of these is a denial of human rights.
Free society
A carefully selective denial of individual freedoms for the greater freedom of a larger society is one of the defining features of a free society. Freedom is not anarchy; freedom is discipline; and to ensure the maintenance of that discipline, we appoint special guardians with special powers to consfiscate certain freedoms at certain times and certain places; and we call those guardians "police officers".
It is as fatuous to maintain that they are guardians of human rights as it is to maintain that firemen's primary duty is to husband water. Police officers do not protect abstract liberties. Courts and parliaments do that. Police officers do their duty by implementing such limitations upon individual liberties as are permitted by courts and parliaments.
Yet the new police service in Northern Ireland is expected "to protect human rights". This is either a recipe for anarchy, or it is mere lip-service to those social pieties which sound so very pleasing to academic ears, far from a stone-throwing mob.
Such ombudsbabble might make go down wonderfully in a university faculty, but less so on the Garvaghy Road, where the competing rights of orange and green must sooner or later be separated by main force.
And at the end of this peace process mumbo-jumbo, with the IRA arsenals intact, and the moral authority of both states hopelessly corrupted by the concessions made to unrepentant murderers, Northern Ireland will remain what it been for three centuries: a bitterly divided society. Its passions can be curtailed only by a tough police force ready to use controlled violence where necessary; they will not be quelled by a libertarian dance-troupe of officers scattering flowers of peace and assuring rioters of their human rights.
Riot control
So of course, deliberately not training the new police in riot control might appear perfectly spiffing to ombudsologists; but such a policy will not long survive the first contact between dancing human-rights enforcement officers and battle-hardened rioters. Back at the police station, the surviving ballerinas, bruised and battered and spitting out broken teeth, will either be writing their letters of resignation or requesting a supply of body armour and baton rounds, please.
It shouldn't have come to this. Without US involvement, the destruction of the RUC wouldn't have happened. But it has; and now, too late by far, maybe the Colombian affair will finally teach the US State Department never, ever to back cop-killers against cops.
It wouldn't have betrayed the Irish cops of the NYPD against terrorists. Only a truly witless, green-tinted espousal of the plaints of Irish republicanism would have caused it to betray the Irish cops of the RUC.