A call to arms
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington 'One should understand that members of the Royal Family, even remote cousins, have always been targets. The big differ ence now is that the IRA has a much better Chance of hitting them.' This quote from out of the mouth of Peter McMullen, a reputed IR-A bomber who is supposed to have left the organisation and asked for refuge here, appeared in headline-size type on the front Page of the Boston Globe a few days ago. The Globe is the largest paper in the city Where the IRA is said to get most of its financial and political support. The same article continued, "rarely in the past," says McMullen, "were the arms, money and intelligence available to assassinate such prime Royal targets as Prince Charles, Princess Margaret, Princess Anne or even Lord Snowdon. . . even as far back as 1972 and 1973, the IRA targeted for assassination a titled cousin of Queen Elizabeth [the Duke of Kent] who at the time was stationed as a captain in the Royal Scots Greys, an armoured unit assigned to Artnagh • . . But the Brits somehow got wind of the plan, and they pulled him out before he could be hit," ' the Globe reported to a readership unable to judge Whether there is anything to all this, or Whether such yarns are printed to sell papers.
Most Americans, including those of Irish Catholic descent, have never met a member of the IRA and have no stronger opinions about the Irish question than they do about the partition of Cyprus. They don't contribute to the IRA and have probably never been solicited for funds, so obscure is the group's American modus operandi. In a nation of 225 million, 100,000 IRA symPathisers are invisible, but if each of them gives an average of 100 dollars a year, that's enough money to buy a lot of bombs. The Globe, however, reports that the IRA may be getting its money from the PLO, and that the two organisations are working in concert: "The ambush of Sir Richard Sykes, ritish ambassador to the Hague, who died ut a storm of bullets fired by gunmen at Close range in March of this year, was a Combined IRA-PLO operation," says McMullen,' Last week's killings themselves received Ins assive coverage in the mass media, all of it ympathetic to the United Kingdom. Earl Mountbatten was not a familiar figure to the generation grown to adulthood in the years his prominence in the second world and India, but sadness for all who died W absence as wide and genuine as the utter tsenee of ideas about what might be done ob help. The offer of mediation by New York's governor, Hugh Carey, a gentleman alleged to be more bibulous than bold, elicited embarrassed groans, at least from those with the sense to look around the planet at the United States's intrusively ineffectual efforts to broker peace in Cyp rus, the Middle East, Zimbabwe, Greece and Turkey and who can count where else. One good thing that may come out of the tragedy, however, is increased public support for the detection and prevention of any gun-running to Ireland from the United States. In the last few days, also, considerable radio and television time has been devoted to warning people that the money they might be giving, ostensibly to help the victims of violence in Northern Ireland, may be used instead to buy weapons.
Elsewhere, weapons sold long ago to Iran were being used by the Ayatollah's government in its latest attempt to crush Kurdish nationalism. After putting on ear-plugs to block out the sounds of the Ayatollah's firing squads, Washington offered the new Islamic republic replacement parts and ammunition, as well as announcing it had sold keiosene to Iran as a 'humanitarian' gesture to a government evidently too occupied with imitating its predecessor's more unpleasant ways to fix its refineries. In any event, these transactions emphasise the American government's need to prop up the status quo, any status quo, that will provide us with oil.
Be it the Shah's secret police, or the Ayatollah's midnight tribunals, most Americans are resigned to supporting whatever government is sitting in Teheran in exchange for gasoline to run the family Buick. Less equanimity exists, however, over the 3,000 Russian 'combat' troops recently discovered in Cuba. The administration allowed Senator Frank Church, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to announce the news of this new military presence, because Church's popularity in his home state of Idaho isn't what it might be, and he has to face re-election next year. This is also a way of demonstrating that Washington is sternly unhappy about the troops, although no one in authority contends they constitute a threat — unless it is to Cubans themselves. Moreover, their presence doesn't violate any important agreement between the United States and Russia, but it does give those senators who don't, fundamentally, want to vote for SALT one more excuse for not doing so. It has also stimulated a discussion of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis which, the conservatives reiterate, the United States won because it had a military superiority that it doesn't possess now.
Though the State Department wants the 3,000 Russian soldiers in Cuba to go home, it devoted a great deal of time and trouble to keep one rather sinewy ballerina from doing just that. Ludmila Vlasova could no doubt have left the touring Bolshoi dance company, if she had wanted to, just as her husband Alexandre Gudunov did. Instead, what had the earmarks of a battle between husband and wife got upgraded into a diplomatic cause célèbre, and one that was so botched by the American authorities that it is no wonder we have trouble making an agreement with the Russians.
Whilst the super-powers argued over who was going to take the ballerina to supper, the President and Vice-President were both away from Washington on their voyages. Walter Mondale, who, every week, takes his vocation as a boy scout leader more seriously, had taken his decent, humourless self off to China, where, judging from the reports wafting homeward, he ground out stolid Midwestern farmer clichés at the citizens of the Middle Kingdom who risked massive narcosis by putting the excessively sincere Mondale on national television — something that would never happen here.
Mr Mondale's boss took himself and his family down the Mississippi on a rearwheeled steam paddle boat. Carter was up every morning at 5 a.m. waking the other passengers, as his pounding sneakers jogaround the upper deck; the rest of his days were spent listening to the boat's Dixieland band and stopping at every town on the river to give a speech and get a scroll of appreciation. The discomfiture of the accompanying Washington press people at Carter's friendly reception was manifest. The folks in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri living along the banks of the father of the waters, whatever their party preferences, obviously recognised in Jimmy one of their own: a sober, god-fearin', uprightliving', hard-workin' son of the soil.
The same cannot be said for some of Mr Carter's staff. The owners of the modish Manhattan nightclub, Studio 54, are being chased by the government for criminal failure to pay their taxes. They, in turn, are claiming that Hamilton Jordan, the White House chief of staff, asked for, and sniffed, cocaine at their establisbment a year ago. It is extraordinary, however, that Mr Jordan, who is anything but 'trendy', was even allowed in the joint. The White House denies all, and the denials are at least credible. But whether Mr Jordan snorts the scandalously expensive and decidedly illegal white powder, a lot of other people in government do — nor are they all Democrats. Republicans have been seen to roll up their dollar bills, insert one end of the green tube in their nostrils while the other end sucks up a little line of the happy-making dust.
This is the second upper-echelon member of Carter's staff to be accused of cokeinhaling, and it comes on top of an accusation by the foreman of a Washington Grand Jury that the Justice Department is involved in a 'cover-up' (oh, fatal word) of yet another staffer in the matter of gaining favours for Robert Vesco, the international stock-swindler whom the American government has been trying for years to bring back for trial. And there is still more. The other day, while out canoeing, the President was set upon by an enormous, amphibious rabbit. Zoologists have objected, saying that not even in Georgia can rabbits swim, but the White House sticks to its story; claiming that our intrepid chief executive beat the rabid rabbit senseless with a paddle in self-defence. There has been nothing like it by a head of government since Mao Tse-Tung swam the Yangtze, or was it the Mississippi?
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