You can’t help but love the way an old-timer in a white aran sweater and houndstooth flat cap tells it. You want to believe in the solidarity of the diaspora. But if what he says is true, the Irish would not have just won their independence; we’d control India, Australia, and, God forbid, Canada.

Instead, what we got was the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, signed 100 years ago this week. The treaty promised Ireland self-government under British dominion, as well as an exit plan for the Ulsterman in the counties to the north. With peace restored after centuries of violence, the Irish, naturally, decided to have another war. The victorious rebels now found themselves fighting the IRA and Éamon de Valera, who rejected the treaty as being too favourable to the British.

The provisional government, led by Michael Collins and the subsequent Irish Free State, turned their attention to an important front in the civil war: the United States. The Government lacked diplomatic recognition under the terms of the treaty, but its mission was not to wrangle support in Washington, DC; it was to convince the Irish Americans who had financed and armed Irish revolutionary forces to rally behind the treaty.

Two years earlier, the American-born de Valera had arrived in the United States as a stowaway on the SS Lapland, having just escaped from prison in England. Once ashore, the self-proclaimed president of the Irish Republic raised the equivalent of $70 million for the revolution in a coast-to-coast barnstorming tour, which drew disapproval from American elites. The grandees of Washington may have thought it uncouth to welcome a phantom dignitary from a non-existent country, but local and state politicians knew they would be whipped from office if they ignored the visit.

Suggested reading

Ireland's Brexit blackmail

By John Lloyd

Babe Ruth’s Boston Red Sox drew 15,000 fans to its 1918 World Series victory, the club’s last championship for nearly a century. Nine months later, 50,000 people packed the same stadium to witness de Valera speak, flanked on the podium by former Mayor James Michael Curley and every member of the city’s Democratic machine. The rapture from the crowd prompted invitations from the governors of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as well as city leaders in Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Ultimately, De Valera’s year-long jaunt across the United States helped the Irish win their independence — and once the civil war started, leaders of the provisional government feared his contacts could be mobilised against the treaty. What they did not appreciate was how polarising a figure de Valera had become among the Irish diaspora.

Irish American leaders bristled at de Valera’s imperial attitude; he was happy to cash the checks and happier still to dismiss his financial backers when they opined on how to spend the money. The Gaelic American, the mouthpiece for the republican movement in the United States, opposed the treaty right up until the moment de Valera agreed with it. “This half-breed Spanish-American Jew intends if he can to turn Ireland into a miniature Mexico where defeated candidates for office refused to abide by the decision of the majority rendered at the election and seek to overthrow the will of the people by force,” the paper said in an editorial.

While some Irish American activists continued to oppose the treaty, Free State officials determined the silent majority of the Irish in America were satisfied to hear that their countrymen had received a reprieve from British oppression. The details of whatever government emerged were of little concern. “The most effective propaganda is frequent dignified statements from the government of the Irish Free State showing that it is functioning successfully and is determined to do so,” diplomat Timothy Smiddy wrote in a memo back home.

Smiddy shifted the focus of the pro-treaty forces from winning the hearts and minds of Irish American activists to publicly re-enforcing the legitimacy of the new government. He set about attempting to undo the very work in America that had helped the Irish win independence, pressing US officials who had once turned a blind eye to gun-running to crack down on it. He prevailed upon activists to ignore the pleas of IRA widows when the hat made its way around the pub. He succeeded on all fronts, but nothing helped his cause more than the American Irish’s unity in their own domestic political machines where ethnic solidarity trumped ideological difference.

As for De Valera, he was soon chastened by the civil war that followed the Anglo-Irish treaty. He appeared to have learned a few important lessons from the machine politicians that kissed his ring back in 1919. James Michael Curley, like the Irish rebel leader, did two prison stints for fraud. This did not stop the Boston Irish from sending him to Congress, the governor’s mansion, and on four occasions to the Mayor’s Office. When he was barred from attending the 1932 Democratic convention with the Massachusetts state delegation, he arrived in Chicago alone. The party clerk must have been puzzled during roll call when the Puerto Rican delegation sent forth its new ‘representative’: Alcalde Jaime Miguel Culeo. The people of Boston could forgive any crime or public embarrassment, so long as Curley delivered on the patronage projects that won him the nickname the “Mayor of the Poor”.

Suggested reading

What if Ireland were united?

By Colm Toibin

By 1926, de Valera cut ties with Sinn Féin and established Fianna Fáil, pledging to take his seat in the Dáil and achieve republican government from within the Irish Free State. In 1932, Fianna Fáil dominated the elections on a populist platform dedicated to public works projects and social security. He delivered on the social safety net, which kept Fianna Fáil in charge long enough to gut the constitution of any trace of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. By July 1937, just two months after someone dynamited George II’s imperial monument in St. Stephen’s Green, the Irish had a new constitution. That “half-breed Spanish Jew” had made good on delivering an authentic and unique Irish Catholic vision for what a Republic could be.

The Sons of Gael who threw their fivers into the hat and their .38s into the barrel throughout the Troubles believed their contributions would deliver de Valera’s romantic vision to their compatriots to the north. Today, you’ll find their American grandchildren on barstools listening in awe to the Old Timer in the Aran Sweater and singing along to “A Nation Once Again”, as indifferent to the particulars on the ground in the old country as their great grandfathers were at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

These youths have embraced smoking and the Clancy Brothers and unapologetic popery to stick it to the secular, technocratic, iconoclastic, opioid-addicted world the dominant protestant class left the United States. Éire is a counter-culture preserved in amber, an escape hatch from a modernity that has left them feeling just as alien as their great grandparents must have felt at Ellis Island.

They have no idea the freedom fighters of the IRA are mere heroin dealers now. That the Emerald Isle has become Europe’s answer to the Cayman Islands, rather than that beacon standing athwart brute materialism. Ireland, freed from the oppression of the Black and Tans, voluntarily followed London’s lead into financialisation and speculation.

It is a nation of bankers and those on the dole, waking up to the realisation that Silicon Valley’s dream of universal basic income exists so the jobless masses can have just enough money in their pockets to pay the billionaire overlord class. The robots aren’t advanced enough to take all the jobs just yet, so they make do with Polish labourers — the only people in Ireland who still go to Mass in the modernist concrete churches.

Suggested reading

The IRA's hunger for martyrs

By Jenny McCartney

To look at Ireland from abroad is to understand the world of John Swanwick Drennan, the least appreciated of the great Irish poets:

A golden casket I designed
To hold a braid of hair
My Love was false and now I find
A coil of serpents there

The Irish resent the pedestal erected by the diaspora. They desire the same freedom to squander the national inheritance as the rest of the West. Occasionally, Irish Americans — or at least a sliver of its activist class — take notice of the retreat from what made Ireland unique only to be dismissed as Cromwellian interlopers.

When Ireland’s technocratic banker class moved to strike the constitutional protection of the unborn, Americans rallied to its defence (the pro-life movement being one of the last vestiges of Irish Catholic machine politics). Irish authorities, hungry as they are for US investment when it comes to corporate tax dodges, suddenly developed an allergy to American dollars. Just as the Irish Free State appealed to higher authorities in DC to stifle the flow of guns, the ruling class turned to Dublin corporate resident Mark Zuckerberg to successfully disarm the opposition.

One hundred years on, de Valera is as welcome in Ireland today as Curley was at the 1932 Democratic convention.

Weinberger was a Right-wing Republican who worked for another, Ronald Reagan, and even in those days Right-wing Republicans were automatically written off as racists. But I never detected the slightest bit of discomfort in Powell’s demeanour, perhaps because neither Weinberger nor Reagan had any doubts about his ability: after leaving the Pentagon for a career-required Corps command once he was promoted to Lieutenant-General, Powell was summoned back to Washington by Reagan to serve as his National Security Advisor. That Powell was the first black man to run the “inter-agency” National Security Council was not much mentioned at the time, as far as I can recall, except perhaps in the vernacular press that I do not read.

More important was the impossible job at hand: in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan’s entire presidency was in question. To outsiders who did not know any better, senility seemed the most charitable explanation for the President’s active support for an insane caper that ended at Tehran’s airport — and which could have left a very senior US official in Iranian custody.

His predecessor Carlucci, under Chief of Staff  Howard Baker, ex Senate Majority Leader no less, stopped the shipwreck, but it was Powell who righted the ship along with Reagan himself, and to such good effect that the faithful Reaganauts who had been plotting a backdoor exit from the White House for their hero when the scandal exploded suddenly found themselves discussing the possibility of the first third-term President since Roosevelt: Reagan’s ascent in the public opinion polls was astounding.

The famous Powell doctrine enunciated in 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, weas that if the US goes to war, it must not play “controlled escalation” games as it did, disastrously, in Vietnam. If force had to be used, it was best used on the largest possible scale, to quickly end the war rather than start it.

More from this author

Joe Biden was right all along

By Edward Luttwak

But there was also an undeclared Powell doctrine, not for the nation but for himself: prejudice exists; but if it can only be inferred because it is not visibly enacted, just ignore it. Do not sacrifice your own advancement to try to re-educate the malevolent and the ignorant; do not start a scandal that will only exacerbate the problem.

When his boss, Caspar Weinberger, complained in a Senate Hearing that the Senators were ignoring his own Secretarial advice and listening instead to the strategic lucubrations of a “PhD with a foreign accent” — he was referring to me, testifying about my book The Pentagon and the Art of War in a debate about the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act the book called for — Powell told me not to kvetch (he grew up with Yiddish speakers in the Bronx). Just be happy that the Senators are listening to you, he said, and that we will finally be able to re-organise the Pentagon.

But it was not until decades later, in a chance meeting aboard a transatlantic flight, that he told me why he was so little agitated by the subtle racial tensions of the Reagan years. As a battalion commander in Vietnam, he was recruited on a number of occasions by more senior officers to avert racial tensions among the troops, to avoid violence not with fists or even handguns but with fragmentation grenades or even M.16s.

For him, that was the end result of McNamara’s political science: a war not only endless but nonsensical, in which the same village might be flooded with economic aid, propagandised by a provincial team, bombed with napalm to destruction and then rebuilt. Hence his personal approval of Col. Warden’s “Instant Thunder” plan for the 1991 Iraq war: bomb every military target day after day to break up Iraq’s logistics, knock out bases and destroy as many armoured vehicles as possible. Then launch an all-out armoured offensive, force Saddam Hussein’s surrender and retreat from Kuwait — and bring the troops back home.

As a result of the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act, Powell was the first Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff who was in the actual chain of command. And although he was too tactful to order the Army and Marine field commanders about as the subordinates they were, when the Marines started nibbling at Kuwait before the two weeks of bombing was done, he made sure that it was no more than a photo-op. Ignoring the majority view in Washington that air power always disappoints (because it did in Vietnam) he understood that it was best to hollow out an enemy before moving the tanks forward. That was the Powell “first” that really matters: not that he was the first black US military chief, but the first and so far only US military chief since 1945 to win a war.

More from this author

America's failed Machiavelli

By Edward Luttwak

The last thing that Powell thought would happen was the disastrous repudiation two decades later of all that was learned in Vietnam and all that was demonstrated in the 1991 war: that American military power can destroy high-contrast targets anywhere and can defeat enemies that assemble in conveniently targetable mass formations — but cannot defeat insurgents. As Powell well knew, the “counterinsurgency warfare” peddled by generals with PhDs was never more than military malpractice, as Afghanistan 2021 showed yet again.

Over the past week, every obituary of Powell has interrupted its praise to condemn his tenure as Secretary of State (another first for a black man that Powell himself hardly celebrated) because it was his approval that made the 2003 invasion of Iraq politically feasible.

As usual, the media criticises the intelligence malfeasance that trapped Powell — the failure to recognise that Saddam was only pretending to be developing nuclear weapons — as opposed to the inability of the over-staffed, over-funded intelligence community to recognise that if Saddam Hussein and his regime were removed, what would ensue was not “democracy” but a Hobbesian war of all against all as different factions killed each other. (When I testified accordingly before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just before the war, the pro-war witness call me a “racist” who denied that Iraqis could sustain a democracy, just as the Germans and Japanese did after 1945…)

Then there was the fact that an Iraq in civil war would not be able to resist Iran. So there were ultimately two choices: stay out of Iraq, or convert the US Army into a 700,000-strong Mesopotamian constabulary forever. When Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said exactly that in a Congressional Hearing, he received zero support from the Intelligence Community, so Rumsfeld & Co ridiculed him with impunity for something he emphatically did not say — that 700,000 American soldiers were necessary to defeat the Iraqi Army — and denied him the customary extra year.

More from this author

The phoney war between Israel and Hamas

By Edward Luttwak

That was Colin Powell’s world on the eve of the 2003 war that would tarnish his reputation. As a Secretary of State, he could not apply the Powell doctrine to flood Iraq with troops. What he should have done — as he was the first to recognise in the aftermath — was to give a simple choice to Bush: Mr President, either give up the dream of a US-made democracy in Iraq or send in 700,000 troops, which cannot be done.

If the intelligence community had realised and transmitted what was happening in Iraq, Powell could have calmed the war fever with a phone call. Without that support, Powell couldn’t turn harshly against Bush, who was not only the President but also in effect a family friend, from the days of his father’s vice-presidency.

As it was, the second Iraqi war became an agony for him that never actually ended — very poor recompense for a life well-lived from the time that he packed boxes in a Bronx shop as a teenager. Characteristically, Powell kept in touch with the fatherly owner (who urged him to study on at all costs) and then with his sons, all through the years.

I only met Powell now and again over years, and it was only early on, and then in 2003, that those meetings were charged with much significance. But his death is still a real blow. I miss him already.