Rove comments cause ruckus

In an interview given to the Associated Press, Rove said that the future of the battle against al Qaeda would look like the British military’s battle against paramilitaries in Northern Ireland.
“This is going to be more like the conflict in Northern Ireland where the Brits fought terrorism, and there’s no sort of peace accord with al Qaeda saying, ‘we surrender,’ ” Rove was reported as saying in the interview, details of which became public on Thursday.
The precise nature of America’s war against terrorism was under the spotlight during the Republican party’s convention in New York last week, not least because President Bush described the war as being both unwinnable and winnable on consecutive days.
Rove, with his Northern Ireland analogy, appeared to be to be reaching for a more precise explanation as to the nature of the war against terrorism in which the U.S. is so deeply engaged.
But comparison between the war against al Qaeda and, by clear inference in Rove’s case, the IRA, was guaranteed to raise the hackles of Irish Americans who view the context of the North conflict as being far more than just a cut and dried war against terrorism.
New York attorney Frank Durkan, who chairs the Americans for a New Irish Agenda group, said that Rove’s remarks demonstrated “an abysmal ignorance” as to the nature of, and reasons for, the conflict in Northern Ireland.
The conflict, Durkan said, had not been all to do with terrorism.
“It has been about equality, civil rights and, ultimately, national independence,” Durkan said.
Fr. Sean McManus of the Washington, D.C.-based Irish National Caucus took the view that Rove had directly compared the IRA with al Qaeda. This was “stupid,” McManus said in a statement.
McManus also believed that the statement pointed to “some anti-Irish Catholic elements” in the Republican Party.
“While there has always been many fine leaders in the GOP with excellent records on Irish affairs, there has also been, as a matter of historical fact, a strong anti-Irish Catholic element, the no-pope-here crowd,” McManus said.
Rove’s comments drew fire from Democratic candidate John Kerry’s campaign on two fronts: the apparent negation of the Good Friday accord and the comparison between the fight against the IRA and al Qaeda.
“Karl Rove’s comments to AP today suggest that there was no peace accord between the British and the IRA,” Michael Meehan, a Kerry spokesman, said. “We’d like to inform Mr. Rove that in April 1998, the Good Friday agreement, negotiated by Sen. George Mitchell, with the tireless assistance of President Clinton, was in fact a peace accord.
“Unfortunately, these comments are very unhelpful to the current peace process and come on the very day critical talks designed to lead to the restoration of the Northern Ireland Assembly and a devolved government are commencing.
“I guess we now know why the president has failed to engage in the peace process for the last four years,” Meehan said.
George Kivork, the Kerry campaign’s director of ethnic outreach, decried the statement more for its military rather than political content.
“No wonder George Bush has said we can’t win the war on terror. His administration does not even know the difference between al Qaeda and
the IRA,” Kivork said.
“Equating al Qaeda and like-minded groups who hope to provoke a conflict that will radicalize the people of the entire Muslim world, paving the way for an oppressive, fundamentalist empire, to the IRA reveals how poorly this administration understands the threat we face,” Kivork said.
Rep. Richard Neal, a co-chair of the congressional Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs, said that Rove’s timing could not be any worse.
“His comments demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the conflict that has divided the island of Ireland for decades,” he said. “These careless remarks are an unwanted distraction to the important peace talks going on in Belfast.”
Stella O’Leary, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based lobby group Irish American Democrats, said that Rove’s words were “hitting the wrong buttons” with Irish Americans.
“They are reminiscent of [former Secretary of State] James Baker’s ‘gullible’s travels’ remark aimed at President Clinton’s peace efforts in Northern Ireland,” O’Leary said.
Rove’s words followed strenuous efforts by the National Assembly of Irish American Republicans — the GOP’s counterpart to O’Leary’s group — to play up the involvement of the Bush administration in the quest for a final and successful conclusion to the peace process.
The Irish American Republicans secured unprecedented floor time at last week’s GOP convention in New York for an address devoted to Ireland, while the party’s platform statement on the peace process was longer than the Democratic one unveiled in Boston last month.
The Rove ruckus, meanwhile, came on the same day that Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble penned an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that also drew on Northern Ireland’s experiences as a template for the broader global battle against terrorism.
“There is an increasingly fashionable assumption in Europe that terrorism cannot be defeated, only appeased through a process of negotiation that concedes core elements of the terrorists’ agenda. Northern Ireland is frequently cited as proof of this assertion,” Trimble wrote in the Journal.
He went on to describe such a view as “folly” and one that would draw entirely the wrong lesson from Northern Ireland.
Asserting that terrorists had to be fought and not pandered to, Trimble wrote that the IRA had in fact been defeated, though not entirely by military firepower.
“Gerry Adams might be the most famous Irishman on the planet, but at the price of the collapse of his ‘long war’ strategy,” Trimble argued.
Trimble was in New York to attend the Republican convention at Madison Square Garden.
Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Rove’s office said Tuesday that Rove was on a Midwest campaign swing with President Bush and could not be immediately contacted for further comment. However, she indicated that Rove would be willing to elaborate on his Northern Ireland comments as soon as his schedule permitted.
(Susan Falvella-Garraty in Washington contributed to this report.)