Analysis: Hillary Blunders in Northern Ireland

NewsMax.com

Friday, Dec. 15, 2000

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (UPI) – In the admittedly complicated and trapdoor-riddled politics of Northern Ireland, first lady Hillary Clinton has all the grace and skill of a rhinoceros trying to tap-dance. She accompanied her husband, President Clinton, in his dramatic appeal Tuesday for peace in the Irish republic town of Dundalk, a stronghold of the extremists of the Real IRA. And she gave a stirring speech Wednesday on the virtues of peace at Belfast's Grand Opera House.

Both speeches were well received by the sympathetic audiences they were addressed to. But both of them looked certain to play into the hands of the most dangerous political foes of Bill and Hillary Clinton's latest push for a peace deal in Northern Ireland, the activist members of David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party.

The UUP is the main political party of Northern Ireland's majority 900,000 Protestants. Trimble won the Nobel Peace Prize, but risked his political life, by committing it to support a Power-Sharing Executive with parties representing the province's 600,000 minority Catholics. One of them is Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which waged an almost three-decades-long guerrilla war of assassinations and terrorist bombings of civilian targets before declaring a truce three years ago.

Trimble is hanging on to the leadership of the UUP by a hair against angry critics who charge he has sold out by staying in the Executive with Sinn Fein while the IRA still refuses to deactivate, or decommission, any of its weapons supplies. They are believed by Northern Irish security officials to be big enough to equip two light infantry divisions.

Well-placed Protestant unionist political sources told UPI they estimated that Trimble still enjoyed a narrow majority of support in the region of about 53 percent to 47 percent among the 800 members of the UUP's ruling council. But they warned that he could face a renewed challenge to his leadership as early as next month.

In these delicate circumstances, President Clinton focused in his visit to Northern Ireland Wednesday not on huge feel-good public rallies, but on long hours of rolled-up-sleeves politicking with the leaders of the political parties.

But in Dundalk and Belfast, Senator-elect Hillary Clinton committed embarrassing public missteps that did not help him.

This Kiss, This Kiss

In Dundalk, she publicly kissed Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams in front of the rolling television cameras.

People in Northern Ireland have television, too. And that includes Unionist activists and ruling council members. They almost unanimously regard Adams as being the embodiment of evil, or little better.

And most of them share the conviction that Adams led, ordered and directed the horrific IRA terror bombing campaign that set Belfast ablaze in the early 1970s and that killed hundreds of civilians and wounded many more. Adams has always denied this and he was never publicly convicted of any of it, though he was held for years as a suspected IRA member in Northern Ireland's Maze prison.

However, veteran Northern Irish security officials told UPI that in 1974, Adams played a prominent roll in an IRA delegation that held secret peace talks with the British government and that he received a secret British government pardon as a result of it.

For Senator-elect Clinton to publicly embrace Adams with such affection was to signal publicly and dramatically to the embattled Protestant unionists of Northern Ireland that she thought the world of a man they widely regard as their most dangerous and implacable enemy.

And it confirmed many of them in their conviction that she was deeply biased against them. After all, she did not plant any kiss on the lips of Trimble or any other Protestant unionist leader, including the Rev. Ian Paisley.

She compounded her missteps Wednesday amid the ornate, Victorian Gothic décor of Belfast's Grand Opera House.

Aunt Hillary's Bible School

She filled her speech there with arguments and images from the Bible to convince her listeners to embrace the peace "process" and look forward – and not back – with it.

Long excursions into biblical exegesis have never been the first lady's style, to put it mildly. Her labored parallels between the peace "process" and the travails of Moses in the wilderness, therefore, could only arouse the suspicion that she and her speechwriters thought the way to appeal to the Bible-reading fundamentalist Protestants of Northern Ireland was to argue her case from the Good Book.

But if that was the case, the least she could have done was to get her reference right. She compared supporters of peace to the children of Israel following Moses through the wilderness in the Book of Numbers.

"You have been bought through the wilderness with the promise that there is a peaceful land awaiting," she said.

But the Israelites to whom she compared supporters of peace did not expect to enter any "peaceful land," and they certainly did not expect to inherit it peacefully.

The book of Joshua records how they had to militarily conquer that land and how they then dealt with its previous inhabitants by either expelling them or slaughtering them.

That is exactly the fate that the most hard-line Unionist critics of the peace talks fear at the hands of Adams and the IRA if they are abandoned to their mercies, or lack of them. And this unintentional parallel will not have been lost on the members of the UUP Council who preside over Trimble's political fate, and that of the peace "process."

It is not a parallel that will help the efforts of Clinton's husband in Belfast Wednesday to convince Trimble's far-from-loyal supporters that they have nothing to fear from making new concessions.

HENCH adds: I can't wait for her to start making the BIG blunders here, like she did with the healthcare fiasco. She could bring in DOZENS of new seats in teh House, and several Senate seats in the next cycle!

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