Regarding George Mitchell’s predicted failure… They’re all probably right. However, I just received the latest Alumni mag from Colby College, and felt a degree of pride for my old alma mater.
Mitchell (actually a native of Waterville, Maine, where Colby is located) spoke at the school last semester and was confronted by similar doubts in a Q & A. He pointed to the peace process in Ireland, where he also faced deep-seated skepticism and suggestions that he just wrap it up and go home. But, he explained, after months of countless setbacks, intransigence on both sides and disappointment, one day the clouds parted and everything fell into place.
“I was asked not dozens, but hundreds of times by reporters, ‘Senator, you’ve failed. When are you going home?’ Politicians held press conferences demanding that I go home on a regular basis. I persevered because, although I was often discouraged, I always believed that it could be done.”
I’m not suggesting things will go as swimmingly in the Mideast, but I don’t see the choice of Mitchell as a cynical ploy to throw an over-the-hill diplomat into an unwinnable situation; rather, I see him as someone with endless patience and an underlying professional pride who is going to quietly keep knocking at the door. After all, he was also the one that had the cojones to pierce that other sacred cow– professional baseball– and show it was rife with steroids.
I ain’t naive. History says there will be no progress; but Mitchell may yet pull a rabbit out of his hat.
Voskamp is editor of the Block Island Times.
Resigning for Mitchell wouldn’t just be an admission of failure, it would be a way of making a Statement, of speaking the unspeakable truth. Resignation is always the last resort of the honorable in politics.
Instead of focusing on Mitchell, why not focus on the difference between England and Ireland, as contrasted with the Israelis and Palestinians?
Should we even factor in gentiles?
Better to focus on the factor in the US government that makes Israel different from England and Palestine different from Ireland.
“History says there will be no progress; but Mitchell may yet pull a rabbit out of his hat.’
Or somewhere else…hehehe
The NI peace is still wobbly but for all that Mitchell has much to his credit. I think that the success was mainly due to the fact that none of the parties (official British, official Irish, IRA, Protestant hardliners) involved thought that they could really eliminate any other in the near term, that they could all survive regardless. They drew the conclusion that they had to live with each other, so they might as well settle. I guess that Obama thought that the situation was basically the same in Palestine and that all concerned had recognised this beneath their rhetoric. But the parties in Palestine can actually see their way towards the elimination of the other or at least cannot see a way to survive if the other is not eliminated. Obama is the sort of person whose whole life has been dedicated to coexistence and compromise and the whole situation is alien to him. Making compromises with powerful American individuals and with well-funded lobby groups is second nature to him.
It’s true that the Israeli lobby is wildly, grotesquely powerful – but then the Irish Republican lobby was pretty powerful too. But maybe even the lobby would accept terms that were acceptable on the ground in the ME. But the phrase ‘terms acceptable on the ground in the ME’ looks like a contradiction in terms.
I’m not intimately familiar with the Northern Ireland conflict, but were the Irish viewed as sub human by the occupying power as is the case in Israel?
Yes. I don’t know if that was still true in the 1970′s and later, but it was true for centuries–it was also mixed in with anti-Catholic hatreds. Anti-Catholicism was sort of the anti-Islamism of the 19th (and earlier centuries) among some Protestants, though one could also say the same about anti-semitism.
I’d say, as an English Protestant, that mindless anti-Irish racism and Protestant dogmatism were indeed strongly in evidence in the 70s and beyond, as in Ian Paisley’s denunciation of the Pope as ‘antichrist’, though racism, dogmatism and intolerance were by no means absent on the other side. And Anglo-Irish relationships have had their better as well as their worse aspect. As to ‘subhuman’, I would have thought that this line of thinking belongs not to – or less to – old-fashioned religious sentiments, bitter and horrible as these can be, more to those forms of nationalism, like German anti-Semitism, that became entangled with Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century.
“No Irish Allowed.”
Common sign in front of public buildings at certain point in history of USA.
You have to travel to Germany’s short dozen years of old for the same thing regarding the
Jews.
Citizen: You have to travel to Germany’s short dozen years of old for the same thing regarding the Jews.
Or to parts of the US up to the 1960s. My parents encountered such signs in Wisconsin in the mid-50s.
funny video of a wimpy zionist:
link to youtube.com
funny comment! Lol.
“Now that I’m safe in the studio, yes Mel I DO have a problem. Don’t hurt me please.”
What I find funny about this is that according to the reporter, Gibson’s record was expunged. As if everyone from here to Timbuktu hasn’t heard about the news of his arrest back in 2006. “Mel Gibson? No, doesn’t ring a bell”.