The word games of the past week have again stretched the unionist claims to democratic credentials to the point of satire.
No rational observer, examining the issue on its own terms, could do other than conclude that the position taken by Tony Blair is bizarre, abandons good sense and amounts to an embrace of the most undemocratic forces in these islands. But there is a sense in which Mr Blair's attitude is comprehensible, perhaps even understandable, when placed in the context of apparently unrelated events.
It is now clear - not that it was ever otherwise - that unionism's chief objective in pursuing the peace process was to wrong-foot republicans and have them excluded from the political process. The worst nightmare of unionism was that republicans would find a way of giving unionism what it claimed to want, unionists having made a tactical error in setting the jump too low.
They firstly demanded to know whether the cessation of violence was "permanent" and "complete".
This clarified, they wanted an assurance that the war was over. Now they want republicans to get on their knees and admit that they have been wrong about everything and that unionism is utterly blameless. Their purpose was always the criminalisation of republicanism and the settled designation of the conflict as an issue of security within an otherwise normal state.
For a long time it appeared that Mr Blair would refuse to go along with this manoeuvre. A genuine democrat, he has obviously been embarrassed by the antediluvian nature of unionism and frustrated by the absurdity of its claim to a cultural connection to a Britain now far removed from the ludicrous unionist ideology of superiority.
The indications are that, as far as possible, he has been prepared to accept the bona fides of republicans who held that their "war" was necessary in the face of the most reactionary rump in Europe. And while allowing for the need to ensure that David Trimble remained protected from the pincer movement of outright intransigence on both sides, it always seemed that, when the time came to face unionism down, Blair would do it.
Why, then, would he succumb at this late stage to the ultimate agenda of dinosaur unionism? I sense it has to do with the respective responses of unionism and republicanism to the recent war in Iraq, and partly with a degree of pique on Mr Blair's part, arising from the fact that, whereas Mr Trimble supported him on Iraq, republicans assumed an almost comical anti-war posture. This pique would be understandable and even justified, but there is a related possibility of a matter of genuine principle, which might render plausible for the first time the demands of unionism that republicans be forced to spell out their position. The Provisionals' attitude to Iraq was unbelievable, given what they had argued about the conditions of their own war. For a paramilitary organisation, which justified armed struggle in the far more controversial arena of Northern Ireland, to lecture the leaders of the free world on the ethics of confronting one of the world's most evil dictatorships, seemed incredible even if you understood what was going on.
The Provisionals are now subject to the syndrome that spawned and subsumed the Stickies, a kind of end-of-history hankering after liberal respectability, very much at odds with what they had stood for hitherto. The explanation for their posturing on Iraq resides in part also in a desire to make electoral inroads in the Republic, where there is almost no understanding of the paramilitary mindset.
It would be understandable if Mr Blair were seeking to punish this hypocrisy. But beyond this natural response, he can claim two reasonable arguments. One is that the recent posturing by the Provos lends credence to the unionists' insistence that republican claims about the legitimacy of their "war" is bogus and republicans know it to be so.
For if Sinn Féin is as offended by violence as it has claimed to be on Iraq, is it not reasonable to demand of it the outright repudiation of violence at home also?
And there is, too, an added impetus arising from the watershed dimension of September 11th with regard to state responses to violence from what might be termed informal sources.
Caught outside the box of their own parochial issue, the Provisionals have demonstrated themselves to be at best incoherent on issues that are precisely at the core of their own objections to making a full and final statement that they are standing down their war machine. In the circumstances, Mr Blair is entirely justified in telling them to get stuffed.