Ever since he became Prime Minister and began cutting a deal with the IRA, but still more since the 11 September attacks nearly four years ago, Tony Blair has tried to answer a conundrum: how can terrorism be utterly and unforgivably wrong in one case, but tolerable and negotiable in another? Why is murderous Islamic militancy so different from murderous Irish republicanism?
Last week, the Prime Minister was at it again. He unequivocally denounced the terrorists who killed 52 people in London on 7 July and said: 'I do not believe that we should give one inch to them.' At the same time he was preparing to give a mile to another terrorist group. In what was clearly part of a choreographed routine, he anticipated the IRA's statement on Thursday which renounced the 'armed struggle' and 'physical-force republicanism' without in any way apologising for decades of murder.
Leave aside the question of just how much of a landmark last week really was. The IRA's 'ceasefire' in August 1994 was followed for years by more murder, mutilation and gangsterism. If there was a real landmark it was surely in September 2001. After the IRA had enjoyed widespread American support for that long campaign of killing, the Americans finally learnt for themselves what terrorism meant, and the game was up: the IRA could never again return to full-scale violence.
Following the attack in New York, Blair could have taken the opportunity to crush the IRA by branding it as a fascist terrorist movement essentially indistinguishable from al-Qaeda, but he had already locked himself into a position of negotiating with another group of terrorists. Last week he again showed that this position is at once intellectually absurd, historically ignorant, and morally shameful.
He said by way of extenuating the IRA that he could not imagine them killing 3,000 people. That is not merely a dubious argument: as so often with Blair, it is based on premises which are simply false. If the IRA did not kill many more innocents it was not for want of trying. Long before Osama bin Laden had set up shop, the IRA were blowing up pubs and hotels and then moved to office blocks and what they called big-city 'spectaculars'. Their bombs in the City of London caused hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of damage, and might easily have taken thousands of lives.
Any suggestion that the IRA's killing was somehow restrained is grotesquely insulting and painful to those who have been bereaved by vile bombings in Enniskillen or Belfast, London or Birmingham, but the claim is wrong in any case. In proportion to the respective populations of Northern Ireland and the US, the numbers killed by the Provisional IRA are equivalent to 330,000 Americans. Would Blair have dismissed that as a trivial figure?
To say that statistics mitigate murder is obviously contemptible. The difference between the 3,000 killed in the World Trade Centre and the 12 burned to death by the IRA at La Mon House Hotel in 1978 is one of degree, not kind. Blair is a barrister by training. Would he have said as defence counsel that the defendant had indeed killed a woman, but that another man had killed 10 women and that therefore the defendant should be acquitted? Hitler murdered a million Jewish children; would Blair argue that it would have been quite all right if he had only killed 10, 000?
Dimly recognising how shaky its position is, the government has concocted a mixture of specious arguments. Blair insists that there is distinction between terrorists with, and those without, rational and achievable aims. 'I may agree or disagree with it,' he says of the IRA's objective, 'but you can hardly say it is a demand that no sensible person can negotiate on.' If he ever stopped to reflect on what he was saying, he would see how disastrous this argument is: it can only mean that, if demands are negotiable, they may justify terrorist murder.
But his point is simply false. It suits Blair to treat bin Laden as a maniac whose aims are mad as well as bad, but this is far from plainly so. Some of his objectives may seem far-fetched, although restoring the caliphate or driving the infidel from 'Al Andalus' (Spain) is by no means more preposterous than Sinn Fein's ostensible aim of creating a united, socialist, Gaelic-speaking Irish republic. (Anyone who represents Irish republicanism as a rational movement should be asked what other nationalist party names itself in a dead language.)
His assertive bluster only emphasises the fact that Blair does not like awkward questions. He was in petulant form at the Downing Street press conference last Tuesday, not least when Michael White of the Guardian pointed out that a good deal of recent terrorist violence has perfectly clear and attainable objectives, notably the removal of Western forces from the Middle East.
This is not only a problem for Blair, because it suggests what he alone refuses to acknowledge - a link between the Iraq war and terrorism; it is hard anyway to see any true difference between Gerry Adams and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Adams has spent most of his life as part of an organisation responsible for killing innocent people because he wants to drive British troops out of Ulster. Al-Zarqawi kills innocent people because he wants to drive British and American troops from Iraq - and he has every reason to be encouraged by the government's capitulation to the IRA.
Other comparisons are closer than the Middle East. Adams and McGuinness believe that their people have suffered many wrongs, that national borders should be redrawn, and that these together justify 'physical force'. But that is exactly what Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic think as well. They spent the 1990s fighting for a Greater Serbia, and although the historical and political case for a Greater Serbia isn't particularly good, it is overwhelmingly better than the historical and political case for a United Ireland.
The latest phase of Blair's 'war on terror' casts a truly weird light on the Ulster conflict. For years, one of the harshest accusations against the security forces in Northern Ireland was that they were pursuing a 'shoot to kill' policy. Now the Metropolitan Police, with the enthusiastic support of the Prime Minister, openly say they will shoot dead anyone they don't like the look of.
We are told that the policemen who killed an unarmed, innocent Brazilian in London thought their lives were endangered. That is what the army said about the shootings in Londonderry in January 1972. Many hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been spent on the Bloody Sunday inquiry; how much time and money will be spent on an inquiry into the killing in Stockwell?
Beyond all that is something more disturbing still. If there is no moral distinction between Adams and al-Zarqawi, and Adams's objectives are certainly no more honourable or rational than al-Zarqawi's, there is one objective difference: Adams is white. No doubt Tony Blair doesn't consciously think in terms of 'darkies' or Mahometan savages, but the grim and very dangerous truth is that the terrorists he will never negotiate with or give an inch to are Asian by birth or descent and Muslim by religion, whereas the terrorists he propitiates are Catholic, Aryan, white Europeans.
His distinction between good and bad terrorists is not only dishonest, cowardly and hypocritical, it is racist. If millions of embittered youths from Leeds to Basra to Islamabad notice that, should we be surprised?