One Week On

The last line of the poem (regarding the failed bomb warning in an era before mobile phones) illustrates the greatest single difference between the Provos, even at their worst, and the Bin Laden groupies.

The Provos killed plenty of civilians by ‘accident’ (if the inevitable collateral of their campaign can be so described) and ever-expanded their range of ‘legitimate targets’ to include to include reams of civilians only tangentially connected to the ‘British War Machine’. They also periodically killed civilians expressly as sectarian ‘reprisals’ (particularly in 1976 – 7).

However, they didn’t attempt to maximise civilian casualties chosen at random, which is why these amateur brats in London killed more in one attack than the far more professional IRA ever managed.

This, I think, is why Blair is right to recognise the unique threat of Islamicist terror: it’s not so much their capability that is the problem, as their ambition. These people really would use WMD on civilian populations. I can’t think of a terrorist group in the last century with the same limitless tactical repertoire.

Nope, not forgetting. Omagh (Real IRA rather than Provos) was a f**ked up bomb warning, not a no warning bomb. Ditto Birmingham, Guilford, etc. (The Harrods bomb may have been no-warning – I’ll have to check – I seem to remember that the ASU was disbanded). Proxy bombs were not heroic, I agree. Ed Maloney even suggests that an informer riddled Provo leadership Okayed them to discredit the armed struggle. But I don’t hold with that one.

Nah, don’t think so. Most bomb warnings worked. One just doesn’t remember them. Famously, the Provos bombed the centre of Derry so hard that it looked like it had been hit from the air, with virtually no casualties.

The Claudy bombing was on the day of Operation Motorman (re-occupation of No-Go areas by the army – first & only use of tanks in NI), so it was a propaganda disaster for the IRA. It was also a catholic area, so most victims were nationalist politically. Unusually enough, the leader of that ASU was a Catholic priest, who supposedly went a bit barmy thereafter.

There’s a very good, very apposite stanza in Richard Simmons’s ‘Kill the Children’, about another Northern Irish bomb:

‘Sick minds sing sentimental songs
Or speak in dreary prose
Or make ingenious home-made bombs-
And this was one of those’.

they didn’t attempt to maximise civilian casualties chosen at random

No doubt Kingsmills was one of those f**ked-up machine-gun warnings, then.

It’s an unorthodox reading of Simmons’s poem, I’d say, that makes out of it a mitigation of the IRA’s actions.

Mrs Tilton: Amongst other things, I had Kingsmill in mind when I mentioned “sectarian ‘reprisals’ (particularly in 1976 – 7)”. If the last sentence of the poem does not refer to a bomb warning, please parse it for me correctly. If describing the typical IRA MO is mitigation, well I don’t know how to vindicate myself. Tell appealing untruths perhaps?

Dan, my understanding of the Enniskillen Bomb is that the device was not in fact triggered electronically. The IRA put this theory about in the hope of blaming the security forces for exploding it accidentally with scanning devices. It was a timer bomb that was intended to catch security forces sweeping the area. It denotated at the wrong time. This, of course, does not justify the IRA, as such accidents are inevitable, and anyway, levying war was not justified at all in the conditions.

Fair play to you describing the Bloody Sunday killings as murder to a room full of squaddies. My own suspicion is that BS was not murder as such, more over-reaction by pumped-up paras. The killings in Glenfada park may be an exception, however. We’ll see what Saville has to say.

Marc,

the mitigation inheres in your drawing the distinction between IRA bombings, which were sometimes preceded by warnings that sometimes worked, and suicide bombings with no warning. There’s a distinction here, sure. But I’m not altogether persuaded that the distinction imparts any moral lustre on the IRA. To point to the distinction as though it does is startlingly similar to the ‘USA — we’re not as bad as Stalin!’ arguments of morally quadriplegic American warbloggers.

If your intention was not to offer a mitigation of IRA killings (and the final sentence in the penultimate paragraph of your last comment suggests it might not have been), then my reading of your first comment was mistaken. On the basis of that first comment alone, though, I don’t think this an unreasonable mistake.

Mrs Tilton, I’m sorry for giving you a misleading impression. My words mean just what they say: no particular level of moral outrage should be inferred, as I don’t usually do that kind of thing in writing.

PS: ‘USA—we’re not as bad as Stalin!’ does carry some weight with me, I must say. But I think I know what you mean.

Dan,

That’s interesting on BS; you’re quite likely right.

The phrase ‘not heroic’, as you probably recognise, was ironic understatement. Blogs always seem to be demanding appropriate levels of rage, sorrow or whatever (Normblog, for all its merits, does this lot). I find this difficult, & I have two theories why:

1. My parents were of the genuinely stiff-lipped generation.

2. There is the antroplogical concept of ‘telling’, in which one looks for emotional responses in one’s interlocutor in order to identify them as ‘one of us’ or ‘the other’. This is very notable in a divided society such as Northern Ireland (where I come from). It’s often a subtle or non too subtle form of intimdation. This is why it is impolite there to discuss politics at all in mixed company. I think this socialised reserve has become engrained in me.

You’re right, P. O’Neill [any relation? :)] – no warning probably would have been better.

What happened was (if memory serves):

The bomb team was to place the device outside Omagh court-house, while a chap somewhere else was to phone in the warning specifying the location of the bomb and the time of detonation.

The bomb team, who were greenhorns, reached the target to find security forces there. Rather than abort the operation, which would have been standard operating procedure, they dumped the car-bomb down the road (Newry Court House sits on a hill).

Unaware of this, the warning guy phoned through with, as was now the case, the wrong location. Security forces cleared the area, as SOP, but in doing so inadvertently moved a large crowd to the very place where the device now stood.

The RIRA were forced to declare a ceasefire in the following furore; particularly as the Provos now felt they could get away with plugging them if they continued ‘armed struggle’.

I don’t really understand the pathology point. I think it’s just the case that republicans were embarrassed by ‘non legitimate’ civilian casualties, and alomst always tried to avoid them. From security force documents I’ve read, this seems to have been the understanding of the government too. Having said that, ‘legitmate targets’ covered a range beyond anything normally understood as combatants.

It’s certainly the case that ‘accidental’ civilian casualties are inevitable in this kind of campaign, so they cannot be excluded from the moral calculus just because they were disavowed.

Out of interest, have there been any cases of Bin Ladenesque attacks with specific warnings?

‘A [short for Andy] Chap’ was his given name. Odd, eh?

Yep. Very odd.

I’m joking, of course. Please don’t go assaulting any Andy Chaps you might know in revenge.

Anyway to get back on topic: i disagree that Al-Qaeda are sui generis. Aum Shinrikyo actually used WMDs, to maximise civilian casualties (though yet again the idea that this was motiveless malignancy was false: apparently the attack was an attempt to divert attention from Aum when the group obtained some information indicating that police searches were planned). I remember reading in Bill Bryson’s book on Australia that some people suspect that Aum Shinrikyo actually built and even detonated (!!!) a nuclear device in the Australian outback, and nobody noticed!!! Perhaps one of Bryson’s more tasteless jokes, but on the other hand, some people seem to believe it.

I knew Stalin was dead of course, but I was not aware he had turned yet.

That said perhaps someone will make the argument someday in earnest which I will now make in flippant fashion, that the suicide bomber is more moral than the IRA because the suicide bomber kills themself as well as their victims thus dealing out the punishment for their crime. Sounds like the movie Seven now that I think of it. One could work up quite a frothy paen to the noble suicide bomber and the deep brotherhood of death between them and their victims. I am however not sure how sincere it would seem.

“‘I also remember reading something about survivors of the Holocaust who, in vengence, wanted to poison the German water supply and kill millions.’

Marc, IIRC you are very inaccurate here. This is discussed in a book by the BBC journalist Michael Elkins- ‘Forged in Fury’, republished 1997 by Piatkus.'”

No, actually Marc is correct here. This is discussed in an article by E. Spinrak and Idith Zertal in “Toxic Terror” (ed. Jonathan Tucker of the Monterey Institute for International Studies). It’s one of the ten-odd actual cases of terrorist (or non-state actor, if you prefer) use or attempted use of poisons/WMDs.

The organization, called Avenging Israel’s Blood (Dahm Y’Israel Nokeam, or DIN), did plan to poison the city water supplies of several German cities; it even infiltrated a worker into the water utility at Nuremburg. One of their operatives, who had obtained poison (arsenic) from Chaim Weizmann in then-Palestine, was arrested on-ship while travelling back from then-Palestine; he managed to warn his colleagues before his arrest, who dumped the arsenic into the sea.

DIN then switched plans to poisoning Nazi POW’s in Stalag-13. They succeeding in poisoning the rye bread sent to the camp (which was almost exclusively eaten by German prisoners). Casualties are unknown (the Americans did not release details at the time for fear of creating a panic). Press reports at the time claimed that 2,300 were sickened, 207 hospitalized and none killed; DIN members claimed that 4,300 were sickened, 1,000 hospitalized, with 700 paralyzed or killed.

While we’re talking about the ethics of terrorism, I’ve become very interested in the early anarchist terrorists. They went about assassinating people who they thought deserved it, but – at least in some cases – were scrupulous about avoiding killing anyone but the person targeted. Could anyone point me in the direction of a good book or other reference about this movement?

What technology change?