EVEN if he had not been the third Kennedy brother, Edward Kennedy’s 50 years as a US legislator would have earned him much of the wide coverage that is being given to his passing, aged 77 from cancer. But talk by turns of the Kennedy family "magic" and "tragic family jinx" is to entirely miss the point about a remarkable statesman, who for all his flaws and failures, did in the end deserve the high political stature that the Washington establishment accorded him.
Edward Kennedy combined his largely liberal politics with a realism that was often farsighted in its accuracy. The Kennedy clan roots in Ireland and in the Irish community in Massachusetts informed his original sentimental support for the Republican cause in Northern Ireland. However, Provisional IRA violence gradually changed his feelings to one of revulsion at the effects of the rebellion. Nevertheless in 1994 Kennedy persuaded a reluctant Clinton administration to ignore pressure from the UK government and grant IRA leader Gerry Adams a visa to visit the US, because he believed the Republican politician was serious about a cease-fire and negotiated peace. London was furious but Kennedy was proved right. The IRA did want to start talking and Adams’ American trip was a major first move.
Kennedy also saw clearly the disastrous consequences of the Iraq invasion and was one of the few US legislators to speak out. But as a leading Democrat, his interventions were dismissed as politicking against the Republican administration, as indeed were those of his fellow-Democrat Sen. Barack Obama. Nevertheless in January 2004, Kennedy delivered a stunning speech in which item by item he mounted a forensic analysis of the dishonesties of the Bush administration in general and of the falsehoods and subsequent blundering that characterized the Iraq invasion. Indeed Kennedy set out in withering detail the case that the Iraq invasion had been planned by Republican Party neocons the minute US forces were ordered to stop the pursuit of Saddam’s beaten army in the first Gulf War. Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, the old plans were being dusted off and regardless of the known total lack of connection of Saddam’s regime to the crime of Al-Qaeda, the invasion had become a foregone conclusion. Kennedy’s intellectual honesty when excoriating a deed which brought shame and discredit to his country must still be admired.
The excesses of his youth culminating in the tragedy of Chappaquiddick when a woman drowned after his car plunged off a bridge were eclipsed by his rise as a statesman. His failure to win the Democrat presidential nomination did not impede his growing stature within the party. His endorsement probably clinched Obama’s own nomination and his recent support for the president’s health-care reforms was of no less importance and will be much missed.
Colleagues and pundits often exaggerate the qualities of newly dead politicians but for his contribution to peace in Northern Ireland and for the rigor of his thinking over Iraq, Edward Kennedy deserves an honored place in the history books.
A suspicious reticence
EXCERPTS from an editorial in The Independent on Monday:
For a man in the epicenter of an international storm, the previously little-known Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill made a reasonable job in the Scottish Parliament of defending his decision to free the alleged Lockerbie bomber, Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi.
Speaking more as a lawyer than a politician, he argued that any terminally ill prisoner should be shown compassion, even if they have shown none to others. He asserted that he had arrived at the decision to release Al-Megrahi alone, free from political pressure, and denied that doubts about Al-Megrahi ’s guilt or worries about his upcoming appeal had played any part.
It would have been pointlessly cruel to insist that Al-Megrahi die of cancer in a prison cell, but the weak point in MacAskill’s performance was when he tried to explain why the prisoner was not moved to a secure address in Scotland where his family could be with him in his final days.
MacAskill said he knew nothing about a promise the US authorities say they were given, that the world’s only convicted Lockerbie bomber would serve his sentence in Scotland — a promise which, if made, has been broken. He said he relied on the advice of the deputy chief constable of Strathclyde Police that keeping the sick man in Scotland would be a security problem. It seems odd that a policeman should have the decisive say on a matter of such sensitivity.
Meanwhile, if Gordon Brown has an opinion on Al-Megrahi’s release, he is not sharing it with the rest of us. The suspicion must be that the PM is so reticent because it suits his government that a minister from the SNP has shouldered the decision. It would have set back the UK’s steadily improving diplomatic and trade relations with oil-rich Libya if Al-Megrahi died in Scotland. Instead, he is off Britain’s hands, and the SNP must take the political flak.
Seen through the windows of the Foreign Office, only one thing spoilt this satisfactory outcome — those unexpectedly provocative pictures of Al-Megrahi’s triumphal reception in Tripoli, which have inflamed American opinion.
