Bill Clinton was – maybe still is – a master of compartmentalisation. As the Monica Lewinsky controversy swirled around him, as the Whitewater affair threatened to drown him and his wife, Clinton went on engaging in presidential duties, totally focused, as if the door to his Oval Office wasn't shuddering under an impeachment battering ram.
These days Bill's former buddy, Tony Blair, is showing some of the same chutzpah. Like the Clintons, the Blairs have shipped some heavy media fire over the last couple of years – Cherie for some dubious people she's associated with, Tony for going into Iraq alongside his new best mate Bush.
But last week as the Leeds Castle get-together approached, the British PM reached new heights of compartmentalisation. Here's what he told a press conference: "Everybody now believes the only basis on which power can be shared in a way that is fair is if violence is given up completely, and there's no ambiguity about it, no ambivalence, no thinking 'Well, a little bit doesn't matter.' It's got to stop."
Now remember who's speaking. This is the British prime minister who, against a tidal wave of anti-war protest in his own country, insisted that he and George Bush were right to invade Iraq. Not that he personally went in there with George – they sent in men with guns and explosive weaponry. These men had orders to shoot or blow to bits any Iraqi people who tried to resist the invasion of their country. Since that invasion, around 1,000 US and British troops have been killed and approximately 12,000 Iraqi civilians. So that's around 13,000 violent deaths to which Tony Blair has been a willing accomplice.
'Nonsense!' you say. 'The British and the US were rescuing the Iraqis from a horrible tyrant.' Well yes, although at the time they said they were acting because Saddam was threatening the West with weapons of mass destruction. Tony Blair still insists the WMD are out there somewhere, but even he wouldn't attempt to deny the nature of the methods used to removed Saddam. No ambiguity, no ambivalence, and no little-bit-of-violence there. This was a full-blooded shock-and-awe assault, of the sort and on a scale that makes anything the IRA did over the last 10 years look like chicken-feed.
And the man who helped make this mayhem possible, who continues to make it possible, will stand up in Leeds Castle today and insist that politics and violence can't be allowed to mix. Which means that either Tony Blair is as mad as a March hare or he can compartmentalise like there's no tomorrow – which for 13,000 people in Iraq, there won't be.
Maybe it's an English characteristic when dealing with Ireland, this tendency to apply standards and labels that are considered inapplicable elsewhere. Even the most cultured of English people fall into it. This week Mark Lawson, the Guardian columnist and genial host of the arts wing of the BBC's Newsnight, was discussing Peter Taylor's interview with Pat Magee, the man who placed the Brighton bomb. Commenting on the event, Lawson referred matter-of-factly to Magee as a psychopath.
Now you may be sure Lawson wouldn't describe British and American troops in Iraq as psychopaths, and yet those British and American men are engaged in killings far less targeted and far more bloody than any carried out by Pat Magee. Note the moral gap between compartments.
So when Gerry Adams confronts Tony Blair with his bugging device today and wants to know how the British PM squares that with his calls for transparency and trust, he shouldn't be surprised if Mr Blair looks surprised, innocent and even a little hurt. It's just that in Mr Blair's head there are several firmly-bolted compartments, to be opened only in carefully supervised circumstances. There's the 'War in Iraq' compartment, and the 'Spying on republicans' compartment. There's one marked 'Collusion' with the sub-title 'Pat Finucane' (this one is very firmly locked indeed). And if you wanted to look hard enough you'd probably find one labelled 'Unionist paramilitary weapons' and beside it 'Unionist licensed weapons', and maybe even one marked 'Irish self-determination.'
The truth is, Mr Blair knows what's inside all these compartments. But by keeping them sealed tight, he's able to tell himself and the rest of us that the Leeds Castle talks are necessary because of republican perfidy, and will be successful only when republicans commit to peaceful politics.
That he should do so is shameful. That so many in the media accept this compartmentalised claptrap is pathetic.
