They Said What?!?!

While Slugger is currently at a 100+ comments right now on this one and the BBC ran it as a headline I thought I would look into this report and report back to my faithful/non-existent readership. Though before we get to0 deep into his it might help to look at the paragraph that started it all:


"Martin van Creveld has said that the British Army is unique in Northern Ireland in its success against an irregular force. It should be noted that the Army did not 'win' in any recognizable way; rather it achieved it's desired end-state, which allowed a political process to be established without unacceptable levels of intimidation. Security force operations suppressed the level of violence to a level which the RUC and later the PSNI could could cope. The violence was reduced to an extent that made it clear to PIRA that they could not win through violence. This is a major achievement, and one with which the security forces from all three Services, with the Army in the lead should be entirely satisfied. It took a long time but, as van Crefeld said, 'that success is unique'"


This is hardly the sensational wording the BBC was hinting at especially when the report states in two other places that PIRA was defeated. But this too is full of inconsistency in itself. Now if I were a more educated man I would employ some form of Bahktinian analysis to this text but alas since I am not, I will spare us all from that fate and simply note some of the interesting things that the report said.


Although on an interesting side note I would mention that Bahktin did destroy his dissertation during the second world war to make cigarettes. This alone endears him to me because he realized that all of the collected thoughts a man can have in his life do not add up to the simple pleasure guaranteed by a smoke.



Let us start with the quote itself that states that success is defined by the supremacy of the political process. Yet earlier in the report (Chapter 2, para 242) it states that,



"The British government's main objective in the 1980s was the destruction of PIRA."


So then we are faced with the Security Services declaring victory after moving the goal posts I see. This is hardly convincing when it comes to the security services claiming victory. There are also issues surrounding shoot-to-kill and Loughall in particular in which they note,


"The strength of public condemnation with which nationalist media reported such operations indicated the serious effect they had on PIRA".


IE PIRA had some sort of control mechanism on the nationalist media? Come on, that's as weak an argument as I've seen trotted out even on ATW. This is followed shortly thereafter with,


"PIRA have been brought to believe that there was no answer to Army covert operations, and that they would not win through violence. That was probably a key factor [to the political settlement]".


So there you go, it was the shoot-to-kill policy that won the war. Move along, nothing to see here. Though here we go again, just a few pages later the report admits,


"Despite attrition as the 1970s and 1980s moved on, PIRA was able to keep its numbers up".


Now to be honest the report calls "attrition" the arrest of IRA members and is not specifically in reference to shoot-to-kill operation. Though I feel that the use of the word in terms members sent to prison is misleading because it indicates that they are taken out of action and that the total strength of the IRA was depleted as a whole when members were imprisoned and I would say that this was not necessarily the case (re the whole Sandhurst of terror thing).


I would call these throw away fuck ups, because while these lines undermine what the report is trying to say they are not reiterated time and time again as main themes. Although before I get into the meat of this post I would like to point out a nice fuck right off of the bat that should reassure everyone about the intelligence of your military leadership. In the foreword General Sir Mike Jackson states quite frankly,


"The campaign is...one of the very few waged on British soil"


Fine except that the report points out,


"It is...not...accurate to refer to Northern Ireland as 'British'"



And though these seem like relatively minor writing mistakes they betray a laziness of mind that a comp. 150 teacher would have a shit fit over. It might also reassure any Irish reading this to know that most Englishmen find you to a variant on a Briton, not a foreigner (for what it's worth).



While wer'e splitting linguistic hairs I thought would look at how the report refers to PIRA alternately as terrorists and insurgents. It notes the shift took place around '72 as a shift in tactics not as some shift of who they were (ie they did the same things and were the same people). This is what interests me to be truthful. The use of language in the conflict and its consequences for we stand today. As a matter of interest let us look at the difference between an insurgent and a terrorist.



ter-ror-ism, n 1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes. 2. the the state of fear and submission produced produced by terrorism or terrorization. 3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting government.


[note I typed the definition of terrorism instead of terrorist due to the fact that the definition of terrorist came up as "someone who engages in terrorism"]


in-sur-gent, n 1 a person who rises in forcible opposition to lawful authority, esp. a person who engages in armed resistance to a government or to the execution of its laws; rebel.



Let us then turn to our trusty thesaurus to see what we come upwith in terms of word association.


terrorist: alarmist, destroyer, violent person, revolutionist.


compare with,



insurgent: rebel, rebellious


So while the army cites the linguistic shift as a matter of tactics alone the identifying tags associated with the words is significant due to the fact that there is no shared narrative for "the Troubles" and the protagonists involved. The army recognizes the importance of language it is one of the recurring themes throughout the report.

The idea of "Information Operations" and perceptions of dissatisfations feeding the insurgency (or was it a terrorist threat?) is a continual theme brought up in at least seven different spots (by my count). For example,


"The events of Bloody Sunday were immediately exploited by a republican information operation".

So all of the outrage caused by Bloddy Sunday and the boost the IRA received afterwords was due to the fact that,

"insurgency feeds off dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction is a sentiment based on perception"



While there is a good deal of legitimacy to this argument of perception being a key ingredient to the formation of opinion it could be that the perception is reality. I mean people are right to be pissed when 13 innocent people are killed and the unit responsible is decorated by the Queen.

So no this is not the great admission that Republican supporters will be looking for to show that they are still undefeated. Supporters of the state should take little comfort from this badly written sophmoric attempt at a debriefing which deals with as much conjecture as fact. I will be coming back to this report as a lauching point for some of the issues that the report raises (albeit inadvertently)