Opinion: Happy St Patrick's Day - and it's a happier one than usual in Washington.
For the first time in a decade the official observances will not be disfigured by the presence at the White House of Gerry Adams.
When President Bush declared his "war on terror" after September 11th, most of us assumed it was a euphemism. As the eminent British historian Corelli Barnett endeavoured to explain "It is misleading to talk of a 'war on terrorism'. You cannot in logic wage war against a phenomenon, only against a specific enemy." But it seems the president begs to differ. His predecessor was a great performer, and as such he was happy to go along with the performances of others - in this instance, the charade that Gerry Adams had somehow transformed himself into a man of peace, a Gandhi with a Guinness. Alas, the current occupant of the Oval Office is not a performer and thus has less of an appetite for play-acting, particularly when it's as unconvincing as Sinn Féin's: Mr Bush is who he is, he's a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kinda guy. And when he sees Adams, he gets him - which is more than can be said for the British and Irish governments.
So instead of one more chorus of The Wearing of the Green it's the wearing out of the welcome for Sinn Féin at the White House. In their place, President Bush will welcome the fiancée and five sisters of Robert McCartney to Washington. As is now well known, Mr McCartney was beaten with iron sewer rods, slit open from neck to navel, and none of 70 witnesses to his killers saw a thing.
Depravity-wise, what exactly is the difference between Robert McCartney's murder and the lynching and torching of the four US contractors in Fallujah? None - except that the organisation responsible for the former has enjoyed 10 years of White House photo-ops plus the enthusiastic support of the London and Dublin political establishments.
For the last 3½ years one of the most persistent streams of correspondence I've had is from British readers sneering: "Oh-ho. So America's now waging a war on 'terror', is she? Well, where were the bloody Yanks the last 30 years? Passing round the collection box for IRA donations in the bars of Boston and New York, that's where." They have a point. Blowing up grannies and schoolkids at bus stops and shopping centres is always wrong, and the misty shamrock-hued sentimentalisation of it in this particular manifestation speaks poorly for America, the principal source for decades of IRA funding. On the other hand, it was London and Dublin, not Washington, that decided they were going to accommodate the IRA, Her Majesty's government going so far as to make Martin McGuinness the minister of a crown he doesn't deign to recognise.
By contrast, America's role was mostly confined to some platitudinous glad-handing by Bill Clinton - lots of maudlin speeches about how "I truly believe that two sides riven by bitterness and mistrust can learn to coexist on a small island. Look at me and Hillary on our post-Monica vacation on Martha's Vineyard." (I quote from memory.) It wasn't the bloody Yanks who thought Mr McGuinness had such unique talents to bring to the job of "education minister" - though he and his pals have certainly done a grand job educating the citizenry in west Belfast: keep your head down, mind your own business, don't step out of line, nobody saw nuttin'. My British readers' anger is misdirected: it's their own government that's spent 10 years cynically indulging IRA thuggery as nothing more than a little "internal housekeeping". It's George W Bush who's decided enough is enough.
Recognising they had a problem on their hands, the IRA made their now famous offer to Mr McCartney's loved ones. You're right, they said, it was all a mistake, but don't worry, we're really sorry about it - and, just to show how sorry we are, we'll murder his murderers for you.
As an afterthought, they acknowledged that, as a lot of folks were upset by the brutality of the McCartney whack-job, this time they'd eschew the sewer rods, abdomen-slitting, etc., and just do it nice and clean with a bullet straight to the head. Very decent of them.
There's a lesson there in the reformability of terrorists. The IRA's first instinct is to kill. If you complain about the killing, they offer to kill the killers. If you complain about the manner of the killing, they offer to kill more tastefully - "compassionate terrorism", as it were. But it's like Monty Python's spam sketch: there's no menu item that doesn't involve killing. You can get it in any colour as long as it's blood-red.
Even without the IRA's ties to Colombia's Farc and the PLO, American political reality requires Gerry Adams to be persona non grata. Even if one accepts the view that Northern nationalists are an artificially created minority trapped in a gerrymandered state, so what? The same could be said of Iraqi Kurds, whose gerrymandered border dates from the same year and the same source - London, 1922.
The point is the Bush administration is admirably clear-sighted about the world's tinpot thugs. They concluded, rightly, that Yasser Arafat was a waste of time: the Nobel Peace Prize winner did more for peace in the Middle East by dying than he'd done in the previous 40 years. And right now the Sinn Féin/IRA leadership is looking a lot like the PLO's - men who use the lavish patronage of European political leaders as a useful cover for lining their own pockets and eliminating their enemies.
The only difference is that in this case the European leaders concerned - in London and Dublin - are not monkeying with the lives of faraway people of whom they know little, but with their own countries. And, given that Sinn Féin's conversion to a shadow kleptocracy that's a cross between Hizbullah and the Russian Mafia poses a far greater long-term threat to the fundamental identity of the Irish Republic than of the United Kingdom, Dublin's behaviour has been even more foolish. With hindsight, the 1990s were the apogee of terrorist mainstreaming, with Yasser and Gerry given greater access to the White House than your average prime minister of a friendly middle-rank power. And in return for what? The people of Northern Ireland, quite reasonably enough, enjoy being able to go to the pub without having it blown up mid-pint. But peace is more than merely the absence of bombs. And in the past decade, under cover of the "peace process", Sinn Féin has, as Kevin Myers puts it, utterly transformed Ireland's political map - to a degree they could never have accomplished with mere bombs. Some peace process. It is not Bush's job to be tougher on Sinn Féin than Blair or Ahern. But at least in years to come, if they're asking "Who lost Ireland?" we'll know who not to blame.