Blair and Ahern had the IRA by the short and curleys, yet by pushing the GFA, managed to divide NI into political extremes (DUP & SF), and give succour and strength to a revitalised SF in the ROI
Sinn Fein's new-found strength in the Republic has far more to do with the sheer dazzling ineptitude and corruption of both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael than anything else.
I don't think Northern Ireland is more extreme than it was during the troubles- you wouldn't see the likes of Bobby Sands getting elected as an MP these days- and the power of the extremists on both sides is waning.
The IRA were losing by the mid-90s, that much is true, but the GFA gave them a way out without being humiliated. I think that was the intelligent and pragmatic way of dealing with the situation. Backing them into a corner would just have made them become increasingly violent as they tried to cling on, the Manchester and Omagh bombings were the acts of an organisation that knew it was losing and felt it had nothing to lose by becoming increasingly extreme. We saw in Sri Lanka that the atrocities became increasingly extreme just before the Tamil Tigers lost the civil war there, it wouldn't have been any different in Northern Ireland.
Phil. said:
Don't forget the Battle of Britain. R.A.F. pilots had a shoot to kill policy.
Where do you draw the line?
A "shoot to kill" policy against armed combatants who are actively fighting is perfectly acceptable. It's a war, not a game.
Trog said:
At criticising the Germans apparently as there is no mention of the Spanish and Polish cities they bombed or the more famous victims such as Rotterdam, London, Coventry etc.
The awkward truth is that the Allied killed more civilians in one week in Hamburg during Operation Gomorrah than the Nazis killed in a year during The Blitz. The intention of Operation Gomorrah was to raze Hamburg to the ground- the Biblical name given to the bombing raids gives us a teensy little hint as to the intention- and I think it is clearly a war crime.
That doesn't, of course, mean that the Nazis also didn't commit plenty of war crimes.