The world of Northern politics has moved on and taking a page from Bill Clinton, as suggested recently by the president of the US-Ireland Alliance, is no longer an option, writes Steven King.
The US-Ireland Alliance in its mission statement professes to be "a non- partisan, non-profit organisation whose stated aim is to strengthen ties between the United States and the island of Ireland". It sounds very worthy.
How that non-partisanship manifests itself is unclear, though, when one considers that in The Irish Times (November 9th) Trina Vargo, signing herself as the alliance's president, excoriated President Bush and made some highly tendentious assertions about the reasons for the political impasse in Northern Ireland.
"The shortcoming of the administration was not that President Bush wasn't as engaged as Clinton," she wrote, "it was that he wasn't engaged at all." She went on to wonder aloud "if his complete lack of involvement might have been due, in some part, to a sympathetic view of the DUP that political handlers would have advised him against articulating".
She concluded by offering the President six points of (no doubt unwanted) "advice", presumably the agenda she had hoped to have lodged in president-elect Kerry's in-tray by now.
How times have changed. Only last year in The Irish Times, Ms Vargo was singing to a different tune. On January 13th, 2003, she wrote: "The Bush administration is right to be an honest broker in the peace process" and, "Enormous progress has been achieved in the past decade, and the Bush administration is right to do all it can to preserve it." At that time, Ms Vargo was relieved that alleged IRA activity in Colombia was not being regarded in Washington as an infraction of the IRA's cessation.
Her major animus, it seems, is that President Bush in September was not making late-night calls to the key participants in the abortive Leeds Castle talks - as if he had nothing better to do at that time. The president of the "non- partisan" alliance baldly states: "The talks ended without agreement due to the DUP's continued unwillingness to share power with Sinn Féin." Was it just as simple as that? Besides, isn't that "unwillingness" shared by every political party on the island of Ireland, not least Fianna Fáil?
The DUP's handling of the Leeds Castle talks is reproachable. They raised all manner of extraneous, second-order issues rather than put republicans to the test about an alleged IRA offer that even the most expert spin-doctors in London and Dublin could only massage up to "reasonable in its substance and historic in its meaning". When one considers that in the history of the process, minute steps from the IRA have been spun to "seismic" proportion, it is difficult to believe the end of the IRA as a paramilitary organisation was ever in prospect in September.
Trina Vargo should spread the blame for the failure of the Leeds Castle negotiations a little wider, as the British and Irish governments have done. But, then, when President Bush is quoted as believing about Islamic terrorists that "you have to kill them all. They're extremists driven by a dark vision," the DUP's attitude to Sinn Féin comes to her mind.
If the two governments shared that distorted and luxurious assessment of Ian Paisley's party these days, why are they breaking their backs to put together a cross- community DUP-Sinn Féin Executive? Plainly, they do not.
Trina Vargo's article reveals a nostalgia that is shared by many in political Irish- America and here at home. "Take a page from Clinton," she wrote in her "advice" to Bush. The world has moved on. Taking a page from Clinton is not an option. As Ms Vargo herself wrote back in 2000: "If the Northern Ireland situation takes a negative turn, the new president will hesitate to become mired in an issue to which President Clinton dedicated eight years."
Not only has it taken a negative turn but, perhaps, if President Clinton had paid more attention to global terrorism, rather than trying to micromanage events in a region where no American strategic interests are at stake, President Bush would have more time to pursue his personal hobby horses.
Moreover, as Sen George Mitchell has characterised the "client-state" attitude: "If they [the participants] are not really going to begin on each issue until I or someone else comes in from the outside, they're much less likely to be forthcoming and to be willing to compromise among themselves."
The days when an American president could afford to proclaim on the one hand that "anti-terrorism is the number one priority for the United States", but on the other, take the view that "the IRA is separate and distinct. We don't care if they're terrorists," are over.
That double-think is precisely what one former Clinton-era US ambassador accuses Clinton of in a new book, Turf Wars by former Boston College academic, Tim Lynch.
Intense US involvement in Irish issues was possible, and even in American interests, during the period between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the war on terror. It is no longer realistic to expect President Bush personally to start raising issues like the Cory report on the killing of Patrick Finucane in his meetings with Tony Blair. The dreary steeples no longer puncture the international horizon. If there were reciprocity in the US-Irish relationship, things might be different but the special relationship with the UK is not mere rhetoric these days. Allies count.
Given that Sinn Féin holds to doctrinaire anti-American positions on any number of international issues, as exemplified in an editorial in its in-house newspaper An Phoblacht immediately after the Twin Towers attack, Trina Vargo needs to explain what interest the White House has in the advancement of Sinn Féin on the island of Ireland anyway. She has not made the case so far.
Dr Steven King is an adviser to UUP leader Mr David Trimble