"TOO frightened to fight each other, too stupid to agree."
Talleyrand's quip about the attitude of the allies at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 could sum up the state of play in Northern Ireland in 1996. Two years ago tomorrow, the IRA, declared its ceasefire and the tide of history seemed to be turning. Now, nothing but the fear of civil war seems capable of arresting, the slow slide back into barbarism.
As in the Cold War, only the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction seems to limit stupidity. When basic humanity is underwritten by nothing better than the knowledge that the infliction of brutality will be met by equal and opposite violence, things are pretty bad.
And yet the refuge offered by easy pessimism has to be refused. It should be remembered that two years of greatly reduced violence in Northern Ireland are a benefit in themselves. At the most obvious level, there are maybe 120 people still alive who would otherwise be dead. There are children who still have fathers, lovers who still have each other, parents whose lives have not been frozen at the moment of grief when they lost their children.
And to those human gains can be added real political gains: the implicit acceptance by both of the main unionist parties of the role of the Irish: Government in reaching a settlement; the emergence of a sophisticated and progressive loyalist political leadership; the increased level of both cross Border and cross community human contact; the relative subtlety of the Framework Document; and the admittedly tiny crack in the male domination of politics within Northern Ireland that has been opened by the Women's Coalition.
Seen against the backdrop of sectarian standoffs and boycotts, these may be small compensations. But since when has Northern Ireland been so awash with political blessings that it can afford to be nonchalant about any of them?
Nor does it make sense to see the last two years of relative peace as merely a respite in a campaign of violence that will eventually resume in the same way as before. The IRA ceasefire didn't come out of thin air and it didn't come from stroke politics either. It wasn't engineered by Albert Reynolds, John Hume, or even by Gerry Adams. And it wasn't just a tactical manoeuvre. It happened because it had to.
It resulted from at least four objective conditions: the realisation that the IRA's "war" could not be won; the world wide collapse of "revolutionary armed, struggle" after the end of the Cold War; the ability of both the British forces and the re organised loyalist paramilitaries to inflict appalling suffering on members and supporters of the Republican movement and on the wider communities in which they live, and the radical changes in the British Labour Party which ended the illusion that, sooner or later, a Labour government committed to Irish unity and the withdrawal of troops from Northern Ireland would come to power.
MUCH the most important of these factors was, and is, the impossibility of victory for a revolutionary armed struggle in Northern Ireland. The IRA's theory of the "long war", adapted from Mao Tse Tung's On The Protracted War and the Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap's People's War, People's Army, is based on the idea that the one element that a militarily weaker revolutionary force has on its side is time.
The mere ability to persist to remain undefeated, will, the theory goes, eventually so weaken the morale and resolution of the enemy that he will be forced to conclude a settlement on terms favourable to the revolutionaries.
But even the greatest of military strategists, Napoleon, wrote that he was ultimately "obliged to obey a heartless master - the calculation of circumstances and the nature of things". And neither the circumstances nor the nature of the things that will decide the fate of Northern Ireland are conducive to successful revolutionary warfare. The big flaw in the application of the theory is the definition of "the enemy", which is not a distant colonial power but a very large section of the Irish population.
The IRA's dilemma is this - even if the "long war" worked (a very unlikely eventuality in itself) and war weariness led to a British withdrawal, the real struggle - a barbaric sectarian civil war on Bosnian lines without the gloss of revolutionary romance - would just be starting. "Our day" would have come, but it would be a day of waking nightmares, not least for the Catholic ghettos which the IRA is pledged to defend.
Remaining undefeated through the "long war" would have earned not ultimate victory, but the price of admission to the real killing fields.
The IRA's willingness to obey the heartless master of circumstances may, for the moment, have changed. But the circumstances themselves are either the same as they were at midnight on August 31st, 1994, or, from the IRA's point of view, worse. As an experiment to test the idea that sectarian antagonisms are merely the product of war and that the identification of Protestants with the Union would evaporate in peacetime the last two years have been a spectacular failure.
Republicans have always depended on the belief that unionism is created and sustained by British governments and that it would, therefore, wither when Britain decides to pull out. Far from justifying that belief, however, the last two years, in which the unionist parties have set the limits to the actions of the British government, have suggested that the opposite is nearer the truth.
EVEN if the IRA leadership thinks it can ignore these realities, it cannot go back to where it was two years ago. Once you have accepted, as Republican spokespersons have done on many occasions, that the IRA cannot win a military victory, once you have accepted, in the words of Gerry Adams, that "the result of all party talks may fall short of Sinn Fein's overall goals", and once you have accepted, as Sinn Fein told George Mitchell, that the IRA is prepared to consider destroying its weapons, then you can never go back to an epic death or glory struggle.
Having let the cat of compromise out of the bag of epic, revolutionary struggle, the IRA can't put it in again. What soldier, knowing that the war is winding down, is willing to die for a few inches of ground?
It is one thing to ask young people to kill and die, and to ask a community to suffer, with the prospect of a glorious day of victory, however far off, before their eyes. But it is quite different to ask for endless bloody sacrifices merely to improve a political party's bargaining position in negotiations that you know will lead to something far short of your historic goals. Even through the haze of depression that descends on the morning after optimism, that much at least must be clear.