When Terrorists Rule the Coop

There is no clarity if you are clear about economics
and totally unclear about the ways of your own thinking
--Jiddhu Krishnamurti

Q: How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?
A: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one
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New Middle East envoy George Mitchell can probably hootch up with Tony Blair and sandbag their windows for all the good they are going to do. Just because Mitchell thinks he knows something of Northern Ireland does not mean that knowledge can be generalized to the Hamas situation (Old Hand for an Old Mission.)

Northern Ireland could be viewed as a legitimate insurgency. Hamas is not comperable because they lack historical validity, coupled with their stated goal of obliterating their opponent, Israel. This is a different thing than the goals of the IRA, which wants England to leave Ireland and/or share power. Israel, unlike England, has no retrograde position.

While Mitchell is credited with the successful resolution to Northern Ireland's civil war in the Belfast Agreement, that is not a given. We really do not know that there has been a successful conclusion the The Troubles, nor do we know if it was a civil war. As usual, the terms are oblique.

Was Northern Ireland a civil war or a war of national liberation? Was it a war at all? Did Irish Republican Army prisoners enjoy the rights of the Geneva Convention?

In fact, IRA operatives were assassinated, tortured and jailed in somewhat barbaric fashion. They suffered the same confusion of categorization as the U.S.'s detainees: were they criminals or prisoners of war?

Was the IRA terrorist, or a legitimate unconventional asymmetric combat force? Were the British a legitimate force or a foreign occupying Army, a colonial vestige of subjugation? Or were they forces of democracy?

Point being, it is difficult to define the problems of Northern Ireland, yet it is clear that people of the same religion and culture cannot, could not and would not live side-by-side in peace. Christians whose enmity reaches back to before the Battle of the Boyne (1690) still hate one another, regardless of Mr. Mitchell's efforts.

Hamas and Israel is another case of intractable hostilities with little agreement upon terminology. Terrorist group Hamas is now legitimized in its freely elected role in the Palestinian parliament (thank you, George Bush), and has progressed through the spectrum of conflict into a military organization.

Since it represents a state, albeit a dysfunctional one, Hamas is a legitimate representative for Palestinians in Gaza. The problem is that Hamas uses terror tactics to achieve its goals, which unlike those of the IRA, are not the expulsion of the perceived occupiers, but rather, their total destruction.

The IRA does not wish to destroy England, but Hamas does wish to destroy Israel. For Israel, terrorists -- especially state-sanctioned ones like Hamas -- are an existential issue. For England, they are a political problem. For the U.S. versus al-Qaeda, it is a criminal matter.

What is clear is that Muslims, Christians and Jews will always be killing one another, in any combination thereof, and always for their God.