The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 105. War and Peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East (George Mitchell)

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

What is it like to negotiate with terrorists? Will peace ever be possible in the Middle East? How did the Good Friday Agreement come to pass? On today’s episode of Leading, Rory and Alastair are joined by American politician, diplomat and lawyer George Mitchell, to discuss all this and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram:@restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley + Becki Hills Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispolics.com. Welcome to the Restless Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And we are really delighted to have the guests that we have for you today. Senator George Mitchell, I hope he won't mind me saying that he is the oldest guest. ever had on the podcast. He's now into his 90s, but as usual here is despite some very serious health issues of late in very, very fine fethyl and had an amazing career in the law and in politics

in America, but is best known to our UK listeners because he was a fundamental part of the process that led to the Good Friday Agreement and a generation growing up in Northern Ireland, which is where he's speaking to us from now. George, it's lovely to see you. It's lovely to see you looking well, and it's fantastic to see you in Belfast. Well, thank you, I was. It's a pleasure to see and talk with you and to meet and talk with Rory today. Senator, can I begin by bringing us back to Maine and the main of your childhood and the political world in which you grew up in? One of the great advantages of infuing somebody who was born some time ago is you can give us a vision of a different world and a different type of

politics. So would you give us a bit of a sense the Maine you grew up in? And I guess the politics of it. I was struck by the fact that Clinton Claussen, I guess, was Governor of Maine when you were younger and takes you back to a man born in 1895. Give us a bit of a sense of that earlier world. I was born in 1933 at the depths of the Great Depression. My father was the often son of Irish immigrants. His parents had been born in Ireland, had four children in Ireland, and then because of economic difficulties, really poverty and famine. They left, traveled to the United States, part of one of the great human migrations in all of history up to that time. However, his mother died shortly after his birth. His father couldn't care for the children. So my father was raised

in a Catholic orphanage in Boston, and he was ultimately adopted after several years by an elderly childless couple from the state of Maine. As you know, the northeastern most state in the United States. Ironically, almost the exact same geographic size as the island of Ireland, but with a small population, about a million 300,000 now. It was a time of extreme poverty. My father had literally no education. He left school after the third grade. He worked as a laborer and ultimately as a janitor at a local school. His adoptive parents had emigrated to the United States from Lebanon. They were what are called Maronites. It's a part of the Roman Catholic Church, the eastern branch of the Roman Catholic Church. And they lived next door to a couple who had

emigrated from Lebanon. And they were my mother's sister. So when my mother emigrated from Lebanon, she went to live with her sister next door to where my father lived. And that's how they met and were married. It was a very difficult time. My father was a janitor. My mother worked nights in a textile mill. It was primarily originally a French Canadian, what you would call now an industrial slum, directly adjacent to a textile mill where many worked. Gradually, the French became educated, moved up and out, and they were replaced at the bottom by the Lebanese immigrants, who also gradually then got educations and moved on. My parents were the most influential people in my life, of course, as is true with most people.

But although they were both uneducated, my mother couldn't read or write English, they had a fundamental belief that America to them was a place where they could get work and most importantly where their children could get an education and opportunity. Was it a political childhood, George? No. No. They weren't political. Not at all. Not at all. My father was a strong supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, but in no way did my parents ever participate in politics at all. But my father drilled into his five children. I'm one of four boys and one girl, the belief that you're going to go to college. And like many uneducated people, they had an exaggerated belief in the value of education. In other words, they thought if you graduate from college, you automatically, would succeed in life. And it turned out we all did graduate college and everybody did pretty well, but there was a lot of hard work involved in the process too.

And Senator, the fact that you had a mother from Lebanon, who, as you say, couldn't read and write English fluently, did that give you an insight into other cultures and a sympathy for parts of the world that were different to the United States, give you a sense that other people had different types of lives, different views of the world? I think it did later on, but not at the time I was a child growing up. We lived like in a cocoon. My parent didn't own a car. We literally never went anywhere. And our life revolved around church. I went to a parochial school as a youngster and sports. Sports has been the great assimilator in American life. And everybody played sports all the time. And I had three older

brothers who were very famous athletes, which caused me a problem because I was not. And I became known around our small town as Johnny Mitchell's kid brother, the one who isn't any good. So I developed a massive inferiority complex. But my father was perfect for me because my father didn't care about sports. He kept saying to me, look, he said, you study, you work hard. And I promise you eventually your brothers are going to look up to you the way that you look up to them now. And he was right. And George, when did you start to feel that,

I know you went through the law as a lot of politicians do. When did you start to feel that there was within you politics that you wanted to kind of get out there and represent people and change the world? It was much later after I did a tour of duty in the U.S. Army Intelligence Service in Berlin, Germany for two years. And I really feel I grew up there after graduating from Bowden College, a very nice school where they were very kind to me in Maine. And then I went to law school, and my ambition was to practice law in my home state of Maine. I had no interest in politics. I got a job in the United States Department of Justice as a trial lawyer in Washington, which I enjoyed learning the ropes, working my way up. And one day I got a telephone call from a person I'd never met before. He identified himself as the administrative assistant to a

United States, Senator from Maine, Edmund Muskie, a great man, the greatest environmental legislator in the history of the United States. And he said, Senator Muskie wants to hire a young lawyer from Maine. He doesn't know you, but he knows your brothers. And he wonders if you would come up for an interview. The sports starts. Right, from sports. So I went up and had an interview, and he offered me a job. And I said to Senator Muskie, I honestly, I'm not interested in politics. I just want to get a job with a Maine law firm, which I'd been unable to do up until that time. And he said, that's fine. He said, but you promised to stay with me through the next election, which was about two and a half years away. And you can look for a job

practicing law in Maine, and you can work for me during that time. I did, and I ended up getting a job offer. And so after his election, I moved to Maine, but being associated with Senator Muskie kind have infected me with politics. He was a truly great man, a great mentor, and I learned a lot from him, and through him I got involved in politics. I was reading Norman Maylor's account of the 68 Chicago Convention, and it's a kind of vision of a very, very different American politics. You get the sense of these big political bosses coming in from Boston and Chicago and all this kind of stuff. Was Maine different? Did Maine have a sort of slightly different political culture, or was that also caught up in the sort of machine politics of the 30s, 40s and 50s?

I think Maine was different because for a hundred years, Maine was a one-party state. Maine entered the union in 1820, formerly part of Massachusetts, broke off and became part of what is known in American history as the Missouri Compromise. Slavery was a dominant political issue in the United States for 70 years after the nation's founding until the Civil War. And in 1820, for the first time, states were admitted to the Union primarily, in some cases, exclusively on the basis of whether they were slave or not. And so Missouri came in as a slave state. Maine came in as a free state. From 1820 to 1860, Democrats dominated Maine politics. But when the Civil War broke out, the Democratic Party divided North and South.

The Republican Party was created in opposition to slavery, and Maine being a pro-ab abolition state. Maine had the highest per capita rate of deaths and casualties in the Civil War. The Democratic Party, in effect, vanished in Maine, and the Republican Party controlled it for 100 years until Senator Muskie was elected as governor. So we had a one-party politics, which succumbed. to what happens in one-party politics. Factions develop. Internal conflicts occur, and pretty soon some new, young, fresh, outside voice arises, and that was Senator Muskie. He became governor. It dominated Maine politics for a long time, and he made it into a two-party state. So the history

is really unique to our circumstance, but a pattern that is followed in politics, not just in the United States, but around the world. It's interesting how Edmund Muskie plays such a big part in your life, because you were appointed to the Senate when he went on to be Secretary of State. That's right. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you eventually, you talk about one party state, you eventually won with 81% of the vote. I did in my second re-election.

Well, that is pretty impressive, George. That is a pretty good result. Well, let me tell you about the tough part. The record of appointed senators in the United States is very dismal. Very rarely do any get elected to a full term. I was appointed in 1980 to serve. It was about two years until the election. A year later, I was stunned when one of my prospective opponents, a Republican congressman had published a poll which he took that showed in an election, he would defeat me by 36 percentage points. There was another Republican congresswoman who wanted to run, so she released her poll,

which showed that she would defeat me by 33 percentage points. And moreover, she gratuitously included in the poll a possible primary election for me within the Democratic Party, which I would lose by 20 points. So it didn't look very good for a long time. But I worked very hard and things kind of broke my way and I won the first election comfortably. And by the time of the second election, I was in pretty good politically shape. Senator, give us a bit of a glimpse. Now we're jumping forward in time. We're now into you entering the Senate and we're now in the early days of Reagan. What does that whole period of the 1980s feel like to you? What was it like to be in the Senate then? What do you think of Reagan as a president? Where was America then?

I have two contradictory views. The first is that the politics was not as personally hostile, as negative, as destructive as it is today. It's not that this is the first time that's happened. That's a regular feature in American history, including, as I mentioned earlier, the three quarters of a century leading up to the Civil War and the period after the First World War. So we could talk to senators on the other side. The other senator from Maine with me was a man named Bill Cohen, a terrific guy, a very intelligent, thoughtful, effective legislator. We became close friends.

We disagreed on things. We would vote against each other on various issues, but it never affected us personally. We were able to work with each other's. And that was the case in the Senate as a whole, is really quite different from now, even though it was highly political in its own way. It didn't have the corrosive incendiary hostility that exists now and has existed in the past, in which I think over time we'll have a reversion back to a better norm. You became your party leader in the Senate and the other party was led by Bob Dole. And I came across this thing that you said to him, I know you've been around for many years

and you know much more than I do, but in my relatively short time, I've reached the conclusion that managing the Senate is impossible without trust between the two leaders. I'm here to tell you how I intend to behave toward you and ask you to behave toward me in the same manner. And he went on to say that you would never surprise him, you would give him as much notice as possible of every action you were intending to take. You would never criticize him personally. You would never try to embarrass him and you'd always be available to him if he had a concern, question, or issue he wanted to raise. And you said, I would, to the extent humanly possible, always keep my word, and I could tell he was delighted. We shook hands, never once since has a harsh word passed between us in public or in

private. And as you say, that feels like a very, very different era to the one that we're living in now, particularly with Donald Trump, such a dominant figure in American politics. It is. Are you genuinely confident that that is recoverable? I am. First off, that conversation occurred within the first hour after I was elected Senate Majority Leader. I called Bob Doe, and I asked to go see him. I had great respect for him. We didn't know each other well. He was a titan of the Senate, and I was a nobody just a few years earlier. And he was delighted when I asked him that. He reached across the table, we shook hands, and to the moment of his death, not once ever did a harsh word pass between us. We disagree

on most issues. We debated vigorously, but we kept the talk on the issues. We had dinner once a week. We had lunch once a week. We talked through each issue. And as I said, most of the time, we didn't agree, but we went our own way without engaging in a personal attack on the other. Americans are living through troubled times, and many are depressed and discouraged by it. But this is not the first time Americans have lived through troubled times, the revolutionary war, the bitter conflict over slavery, the scourge of our nation's history, which lasted for two centuries, the Great Depression, in which one out of every four working Americans was out of a job, the hysteria after the First World War, the Cold War. Each individual changes and passes through various stages in life,

and so does every society, and so does the politics in every society. So I think we're going through a tough period now, but I think we will come through it as we have in the past. After every one of these controversies that I've mentioned historically, America emerged better, stronger, more free, more just, more open. And that's the challenge that we face today. And I think we will come through it. Senator, before we come back to this story of optimism, which I'd love us to finish on, and I think it's great for us on that podcast to be a little bit more optimistic. But would you just talk us through the predecessors for Donald Trump? Because he didn't come out of nowhere. There was a Tea Party movement. There was Newt Gingrich. Things began to change in American politics in the late 80s, early 90s. Tell us something about what it is that you felt began to change in the way that Congress people and senators did business that began to change American politics. To understand America, politics, you must understand that we are a very, very large country and the most diverse in all of modern history. And as a result, we have very many different points of view,

geographic, political, social, and others. Inevitably, with only two parties in our Republican form of government, each party is not a unit. entity, but itself a coalition of other groups and parties, that really comes together once every four years to contest a national election. Now, historically, as I said, the Democratic Party dominated in the early parts of the country. The Republican Party dominated in the North, in the hundred years after the Civil War. That changed when President Johnson pushed and signed into law, civil rights legislation, and gradually the South changed from Democratic to Republican and the North changed from Republican to mixed, I would say. And the result is that you have

diversity within each party, huge diversity, and there frequently have been third parties and fourth parties. And each one has over time been absorbed by the larger party. And that was true of the modern predecessors of what is now referred to as the Maga movement. The political question now, which history will answer ultimately, is will the group being absorbed dominate the party that they enter, or will they be gradually absorbed in and the party remain the same? That's really the challenge that's occurring within the Republican Party. It's not unique to American history. The outcome may be, unique, but the contest itself is not unique. There have been factions in the Democratic Party for the 240 years of its existence as various issues arose. You go all the way back to the

struggles in the early years. Thomas Jefferson put together a coalition to run against John Adams, who was the incumbent president, two of the icons of American history. And the election of 1800 was one of the most bitterly fought in American history. And Jefferson won because the Federalist, Adams Party, splintered into several groups that could not be reconciled. So there's nothing new in American history about what has occurred up to this time. What will be new is if the group entering a larger party takes over the party as opposed to becoming part of it. We'll maybe come back to the current American scene in a while. But can we just go to Northern Ireland, which is when the skills.

that you developed as a lawyer, as a senator, as a diplomat, as a politician, really, really came good. And you left the Senate voluntarily, relatively young. Bill Clinton then asked you to be a special envoy to Northern Ireland. Now, I'm sure you're aware, the US Institute of Peace has a George Mitchell module that it sends to schools to learn about mediation. And they study you, and then they have to answer this question. What made George Mitchell? an effective mediator. So if you were a child at one of those schools, how would you answer that question? I think the most important quality to bring to negotiations is the capacity for listening. I don't mean going through the formality of listening, which is what we do in most of our personal lives,

but to genuinely listening to every point of view, to give people the opportunity to fully express their positions, not to cut them off or cut them short, even if you disagree with them. And ultimately, to make people believe, because it is true, that they've been heard, that they have a chance to get their view across, to explain it as best as possible. Now, that's easy for me to say in approximately 60 seconds, but it took me five years to do it in Northern Ireland. When President Clinton asked me to serve, he said it would be part-time for six months. Well, I ended up being there five years. I chaired three separate sets of negotiations. I had hundreds of meetings, listening, listening, asking questions. I said to them, you may not succeed, but you will never be able to say that

you were not listened to. And I listened. It was tough at times, painful, long, often repetitious, but I did it. And by the end, I became friendly with all of them. even those who were very hostile to me at the beginning, because they felt that I really did listen to their point of view. And I didn't argue with them. I didn't debate with them, but I would ask questions and make points of view. I had a very good sense of how far each group could go in each area and where there might be some common ground.

And the place where there was obvious and substantial common ground was the fear of a resumption of political violence at a level far higher than had existed before. The history of warfare throughout the history of human beings is one of escalating violence. There are very few wars that begin with the greatest of violence and end with a little violence. They usually go in the opposite direction. And these men and women, the political leaders of Northern Ireland and of the UK government, John Major and Tony Blair, Albert Reynolds, John Bruton, and Bertie Ahern in the Republic of Ireland, and the political leaders in Northern Ireland, they knew, they feared they were concerned that if this process failed, there would be an outbreak of violence that dwarfed what

had gone before, and they did not want to occur. And in effect, at the end of the process, I repeated back to them what they had said to me for five years. And I cannot overstate the courage of the political leaders to which I've referred, particularly in Northern Ireland, men and women who had lived their lives in conflict. They had brought into the negotiations, their prejudices, their biases, their own historical experience. Some of them would actually been engaged in violence, and they wanted to end it, and they did end it. That was a great accomplishment. Now the challenge is to build on that peace to have the kind of open, democratic, prosperous society

with opportunity for all that people everywhere want. Right, let's take a very, very quick break, and then we'll be back in a minute. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung Vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer

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forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samaruk here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a

malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues.

We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. And we'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1970s. a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time,

to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Center, can you try to bring us back to what it felt like at the time and maybe give us an example of the kind of things that you had to hear from unionist politicians that initially surprised you or troubled you, what was unexpected in terms of people's perspectives, how they viewed the world? Can you just sort of bring that to life a bit? Well, my beginning was rocky.

Prime Minister Major and Prime Minister John Bruton came to Belfast on June 10, 1996, to give speeches announcing the opening of the talks that they left and went back home. There began a two-day argument among the delegates as to whether I was fit to serve as chairman. And it was kind of strange. My great colleagues who served with me, the former prime minister, Minister of Finland, Harry Holkerie and the former Chief of the Canadian Defense Forces, General John DeShastelaine, sat in a room across the hall and the sound was piped in. It wasn't a video then. It was just sound. And I sat there for two days listening to people debate my fitness.

And it was kind of a strange experience, I will say. And then about 12.31 o'clock in the morning, the second day that the UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, came into our room, he said, we've decided we've got to start, so we're going in. And I said to my colleagues, this sounds like the invasion of Normandy going on to enemy territory. And so when I walked into the room, there was this big room, you know, there were about 75 people. There were 10 political parties and two governments and the chairman, and each one had an entourage of 4 or 5A. So the room was back. And immediately to my right, Dr. Paisley and the members of the L.C. Unionist Party and a fellow

named Paul McCartney, who had a small party that was affiliated with Dr. P. They were up on the feet yelling, really yelling loudly, no, no, no, no, and banging on the table. That was my entry in the process, 1.30 in the morning. Because the first thing I thought is, what the heck am I doing here? This has got work. So we talked through it. And what happened was I tried to calm myself down, and so I gave a brief talk to the delegates and tried to establish some sense of normality and rational proceedings to the group.

And then I said, well, we'll take a break and we'll meet back here later this morning. And so I called Dr. Paisley. It was late at night, and I said, look, I said you've made your point. You left, and everybody understands that you don't think I'm fit to be chairman. but the process is underway and really you're better off to come back and you can exert your influence in the process rather than being outside. And he agreed and they showed up the next morning. They left about a year later when, a little over a year later when Sinn Féin get into the talks. But we got going and they're all intelligent, smart people. They just had different ways of advancing their causes. And gradually, I made it a point to give

everybody the chance to be heard, to listen to every argument on a few occasions. Although there weren't many lawyers in the group, they like to use legal terms. So I constantly heard people send him, say, point of order, Mr. Chairman. And so I've been a federal judge before, so I used to presiding at legal proceedings. So I started injecting a little legality into it. If it was an important issue, I would write a legal opinion. And I would read the legal opinion, as though I was the judge at a proceeding and distributed to them. But they kind of respected that. Two or three, they'd come up to her after and said, well, you know, I don't agree with you,

but I appreciate you took the time to put your thoughts down in writing. So gradually, gradually, slowly it developed. I understood what they all were doing and talking about. I want to say that a lot of nice things have been said about me, but the one I most appreciate there was a fellow. He's a terrific guy named Billy Hutchinson, one of the loyalest. parties, been involved in the conflict, and he said much later, of me, he listened to agreement. And I thought that pretty much captured what happened.

You obviously, as we all did, had to meet some people that we knew had done some pretty difficult things that, you know, were quite hard to kind of accept and to live with. And at the start, what became known as the Mitchell principles, they came when you were trying to address the issue of decommissioning of weapons. That's right. Was decommissioning of all the issues that were involved in getting to the Good Friday Agreement, do you think decommissioning was the hardest nut to crack? Without a doubt, it was the principal obstacle to beginning the talks in the first place,

and it remained an issue throughout the talks and even after the talks until decommissioning was finally achieved. Now, for the benefit of the audience, decommissioning is a phrase made up. It meant the surrender of weapons by all paramilitary groups that were associated with any of the political parties in Northern Ireland and the destruction of those weapons. Now, everybody understood that could not be the final answer because they could turn in their weapons one day and go out and buy another group of weapons the next day. But they also understood that it was an important symbolic gesture. So the challenge that De Shastlin and Holcray and I had had, the first challenge before the talks began, was to figure out a way to provide a substitute for the decommissioning of weapons because we determined after intensive inquiry that there was no one in Northern Ireland who believed that decommissioning prior to the talks beginning would actually occur, including those who favored the policy. Yeah. So we devised with the help of a brilliant UK political leader, Michael Ancrum made some

suggestion to us. We devised what became known as the Mitchell principles. And they were essentially a set of principles that required full commitment to nonviolence to anybody who entered the talks, not just in the talks themselves. You couldn't, for example, if you didn't get you away in the talks, sick to paramilitaries on the other side, you had to accept the results of the talks in the same way. And that really was the breakthrough that permitted the entry into the talks of the people who are actually fighting the conflict. The problem with the prior negotiations which failed was that they excluded from the

talks those who are actually engaged in the conflict. And it's very hard to end any conflict if the people who are actually fighting it are excluded from the negotiations. And that was probably the most important contribution that Prime Minister Holcary, General Shashlin and I made to the talks, the establishment of the Mitchell principles, which committed everyone to nonviolence. Senator, we'll maybe come back to Northern and again, but that obviously provides a good transition to talk about the work that she did as a Middle East envoy, because we're talking today in the middle of massive Israeli bombardments on his liberal oppositions in Lebanon. And I guess one of the most difficult cases for this question of talking to the people who are doing the fighting is in the Middle East, where presumably that would imply that at some level you have to talk to Hamas, if they're the people with the guns.

Talk us through how these lessons do or don't apply to the Middle East and where the problems are in practice of trying to implement these ideas. Well, I'll begin with a humorous story. That makes a point. Many years after Northern Ireland, and I had done my first tour of duty in the Middle East, I was honored by an Irish-American group in New York. They asked me to speak. And I said to them that I'd gone to Northern Ireland, and I spent five years, and I thought it was pretty rough. And then I went to the Middle East. And I came to realize that the Irish were just a bunch of patsies.

I said, if you want some really tough guys, go to the Middle East. It is obviously and plainly and regrettably far more complicated. It has historical roots that go back much further than the 800 years of British domination of Ireland that goes back much further than the partition of Ireland in 1920. Right now, indeed, there are both Palestinian and Israeli archaeological efforts going on across the Middle East to prove who was there first. Was it 3,000 years ago? Was it 5,000 years ago? You have intersecting conflicts. For example, one of the great figures of world history was Muhammad, who in effect established and created what we know is the modern religion of Islam. And he was both a political

and military leader. And through his efforts, the Islamic world extended to a very large part of what is now, modern Europe and North Africa. Upon his death, a civil war occurred that lasted about 40 years between two groups of his adherents. One group primarily is blood relatives, one group primarily the bureaucracy that it built up around him to create and govern this large part of the world. After 40 years, the bureaucracy prevailed. They became the Sunni, the blood relatives lost. They became the Shia. And for 14,500 years, they've been in bloody conflict, which continues to this very moment. That's an intersecting conflict that has a direct and continuing relationship upon the conflict that exists between Israelis and Palestinians or other Arabs. There are many,

many other internal conflicts complicating the issues from all sides. It's not the same as Northern Island, far more complicated, far more difficult, far more ancient, far more bloody, far more weapons. There were never rockets fired from one part of Ireland to another. You never had the level of death and destruction that you have in the Middle East. It's a very difficult situation. I think comparisons are not useful in most instances in life, and there really aren't any valid comparisons between Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

That being said, George, you've received deservedly many, many awards for the work you did in Northern Ireland. And when you received the Presidential Medal, you said, I believe there's no such thing as a conflict that cannot be ended. They're created and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings. No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail.

But as you've just said, this thing has gone on for many, many, many, many, much. many years. Do you feel confidence that that current conflict can be ended? Yes, I can. And it's a paradox because scientific advancement in human affairs has altered human lives dramatically and irrevocably. Not the most brilliant person in the past could have envisioned the kind of lives we need love with communications, transportation, jet planes, particularly in the area of killing other humans has science advanced dramatically. So the capacity for destruction is much, much greater than in the past. The capacity for long-range destruction. If you go back over human history, almost all the battles were personal battles fought on a field somewhere. And now the capacity

is unlimited. Look at what's happened in the Middle East just this past couple of weeks, the employment of science to achieve political ends through destructive mechanisms. And I think that very fact is going to lead the leaders of the region eventually to come to recognition that what they're fighting for and against cannot be achieved through the means that they are using and that the capacity for destruction is growing so rapidly that they will then understand that the only way to do this is to resolve their differences. Just think for a moment about the extent of the debate we're now having in a Ukraine over how far can we go without triggering a nuclear response from Russia. And what would we do if there were a nuclear response for the

first time in the 300,000 years of the history of human beings on Earth? Human beings, possess the capacity to destroy life on earth. That has never existed until the lifetimes of the three of us. That exists now. And so I think that it will serve as a break, a restraining force on the extensive use of violence. And as hopeless as it now seems, I think solutions in the Middle East are possible where people can live side by side, not out of affection for each other, but out of fear of each other. And I think it's still going to happen, although very likely not in my lifetime, perhaps hopefully in yours. So, you slightly slipped around my attempt to say, at some level you have to negotiate with

terrorists. You have to negotiate with Sinn Féin and through the IRA. And presumably you have to negotiate with Hamas. And I'd love you to talk a little bit about why that's true, why that's difficult, why maybe that question's a bit irritating to you and what's missed in that conversation? Let's be clear now. Go back in time. The Muslim Brotherhood is a political organization that is based on religious principles. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Gaza, and the Muslim Brotherhood in other parts of the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and other countries. Hamas doesn't want a republic of Palestinians. It wants the Islamic State of Palestine. And the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt wants the Islamic State of Egypt. There are counter forces within the Arab nations.

Fata, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was a secular organization. It did not seek to establish an Islamic State of Palestine, it sought to establish a Palestinian democracy based upon what we call Western models and ideals. That's a clash that's internal. That has nothing to do with the United States or the United Kingdom or even Israel. It's internal to the Arab societies. And it goes on to this very day. One of the principal arguments made against Prime Minister Netanyahu is that he saw that and condoned that because he did not want to agree to a two-state solution with the Palestinians. That's a matter of internal politics within Israel. So you have a very difficult situation because the objectives of the groups

themselves of the Palestinians are so different, as you well know, Rory and Alistah, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas fought a civil war in Gaza for control of Gaza. It lasted only a couple of days and Hamas defeated the Palestinian Authority and drove them out so that they're now in these two enclaves. I think that you have to acknowledge and recognize the tremendous internal conflicts. Most of the people killed by terrorism are killed by Sunni terrorists, not by shunni terrorists, not by Shia terrorists, if you measure the whole Middle East and the world. The conflict within the Palestinian, Hamas, tends to concentrate itself internally on their own conflict. The larger Islamic organizations like bin Laden and al-Qaeda and so forth tend to be from the Sunni side. So you have a

terrific internal conflict going on within all the Arab societies. And there's got to come a time where there is a recognition that resolution of that conflict or at least mitigation of that conflict is essential to bring those societies together because look, people there want the same thing that people want in London and in Belfast and in the state of Maine and all across America. What do people want? They want a chance for a decent job, a decent place to live, and most importantly for their kids to get off to a good start in life. That's the one thing that transcends all of these political divisions.

I do believe, as I said, certainly not in my lifetime, but in time that will come across, and this conflict will at least be mitigated, if not resolved, as people come to recognize that their common interest outweighs the many differences that they have political and religious. One thing that we're seeing now in relation to the Middle East is the sort of the sense of what feels like never-ending setback. And I want to address that issue of the setback and the role of setback. And once Tony Blair had followed John Major and was taking things forward, I think what felt like one of the biggest setbacks was the 1998 Omar bombing. That just felt at the time like, oh my God.

And of course, the reactions of people was what turned it into something that moved it forward. You actually named your daughter after somebody who was a victim. of that bombing. So just give me your sense of Omar and then the story of Claire Bowes. It was one of the most shocking things I heard. After the agreement was reached in April, the referendum approving it overwhelmingly in Ireland and Northern Ireland occurred in late May. And I returned and my wife and I went to a place where we now have a home. We were then renting. And it was in the middle of August. I remember it was a Saturday. And I was about to leave to give a speech at a local event for some cause that I was asked to do often in those days. And just before I

left, I got a phone call that said that had been a serious bombing in Omaha, lots of people killed and hurt. And I said, well, look, I have to go to do this event, but I'll come back. And although I knew it would be early morning hours in Belfast, I said, I'll call you back. So I went to this event, And I'll never forget of all the hundreds of maybe more speeches I've given in my life, did I ever give a speech that I wasn't thinking about what I was saying, but all I could think of was what's happened in Omaha. And, of course, when I got back, I heard the terrible news. The very next day, President Clinton's office called me and said he was going to Belfast in a few days

with Primus de Blair, and he wanted me to come with him to meet with families of the survivors and the victims. So we went to OMA and in the local community hall there was an August night. It was extremely hot and humid. There was no air conditioning. President Clinton spoke. Prime Minister Blair spoke. I spoke.

And then they asked the three of us to go to separate corners of the building so that people could form lines to come and talk with us and tell us their story. So we did that. And in the line that I was meeting and talking with, they all were shocking and dramatic and really heartbreaking, but two of them stood out in my mind. One young man came, and he had been in Omaha that day, and in the bombing, his wife, who was pregnant with a daughter, and his wife's mother were all killed. I think of it, three generation of women in one family. were killed in his mom. And I'll never forget him saying to me, Senator, he said, my young son asks me every day, when is mummy coming home? And I don't know what to say to him. And I never forgot that. Then I met a Trudy, beautiful, lovely woman, Claire Gallagher. She was an aspiring

concert pianist. And in the blast, she had lost both of her eyes. Her face had been struck by Shrapno, so there were huge scars on her forward and cheek. And where her eyes had been, there were two huge white pads. She was irrevocably rendered blind at the age of 15, an aspiring concert pianist. And she felt for my hands and put our hands together. And she said to me, Senator, she said, you can't stop. You've got to keep working to prevent what happened to me from happening as someone else. And I was so incredibly moved. We have remained friends for life.

I go to visit her frequently. I visit Northern Ireland. She's recovered. She went to Queen's University. She now helps other people who are blinded. And she has two young children, not so young now. But she's a wonderful person. And so a few years later, not long after, my wife and I had a daughter,

and we decided to name her Claire. And to me, Claire Gallagher symbolizes the strength and resilience of the people of Northern Ireland. She recovered from unimaginable loss and now is a constructive, contributing citizen of a society that wants to make sure that doesn't happen to anybody else. I was there with Tony Blair, and it's really interesting what you just said about what they're saying because my overwhelming memory of that day was people saying to him, you cannot stop, you cannot go backwards, this has to stop. And that's what I meant earlier about. It felt like we thought it was maybe a massive setback, but there was this sense of propulsion forward.

Yes, right. The opposite of what the murderers intended. Yeah. The murderers intended to try to break apart again the political leaders and the public in Northern Ireland. But they didn't do it. Trimble was the first minister, Seamus Mallon, was the deputy first minister. They came together and the people came together. And it did. It did provide a propulsive because it was so horrific. It was just a terrible thing. And Jerry Adams and Martin McGuinness said the right thing. Everybody said the right thing. All of the political leaders, not one had a false note, not one gave encouragement to these killers. And it really did produce the opposite effect of what those committed the crime intended. Yeah.

Give us a bit of a sense of somebody like Ian Paisley, Dr. Paisley. What was he like, and how do you reckon he made this eventual miraculous turn to embrace some kind of settlement and peace? Because from everything that I've read about him and heard about him in the 1970s, 80s, early 90s, you would have thought that he had a very clear political position. He had very clear views in the world. And they didn't have much to do with the settlement that ended up happening. So how did that happen? Who was he? Did he have a miraculous change of mind? What's going on there? Well, first off, my conclusion, after a lifetime in politics in the United States, in Northern Ireland, Middle East, is that everyone has a capacity for change. No one is immune to the events that occur around them, let alone what occurs in their own mind and their own dealings with others.

Dr. Paisley was very strongly and I could say accurately, bitterly opposed to my serving as chairman. He told me so directly to my face. And he came to me frequently and would say to me, I just want you to know I'm going to go out and have a press conference demanding that you leave because you are unfit for this position. I suspect your religion didn't help, George. No, well, lots of things didn't help. I was an American, strike one. I was a Democrat, strike two, and I am a Catholic, strike three. In baseball terms, you're out. But I listened to him because I figured, look, I'm a former politician. I'm not here in a political capacity. They are politicians. Every day, they're fighting for their

political lives. They want to retain. They support they have. So they're going to say things about me and about other things that I don't like. But the last thing they need and the last thing I need is for me to engage in a political back and forth with them. So I never responded. And over time, we met dozens and dozens of times. Gradually, I think that we came to an understanding that I was going to stay. I was there for what I thought was a good cause. And I hope to you to agree. He didn't at first. Of course, he walked out of the talks when Sinn Féin entered. However, after I left, re-entered the process in a further talks at St. Andrews.

And then he became the first minister. And so he adapted to the politics rather than the politics adapting to him. And thereafter, whenever he and Montmiggins, who is the deputy first minister, would come to the U.S., they always call me up and asked me to go to their meeting. I can't tell you how many dozens, maybe hundreds of pictures are taken with Dr. Paisley, one arm around me and Martin McGinnis on the other side, the other arm around me. We became pals, buddies in a common cause. Everybody is susceptible to change for the better, myself included. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life and done things I wished I hadn't, but you learn and you

improve. And I think that happened to Dr. Paisley. And I have to say to this with some regret that his son, who I like and admire, I think as a good public official, didn't prevail in the last election for the parliament. And I hope he tries again and is reelected at some future time. George, last time we saw you was in Belfast at Queens, where you are now, where in the presence of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and lots of others, there was a statue unveiled to you. and you said when you're looking at a statue of yourself, you know that the end is near. Now, you're now in your early 90s. As everybody has heard, you're in pretty good spirits and you're in fine fetal, but you've also

had some really serious health issues. How have you dealt with that and how have you come through that in the shape that you seem to be in now? It's been very difficult. Five years ago, I was diagnosed with acute leukemia, and I had to go to the hospital immediately, and I ended up receiving about two and a half years of chemotherapy. So for a long time, I really lost touch with the outside world. I didn't read a newspaper or watch television. I really struggled to stay alive. Fortunately, I had excellent medical care, and the cancer

has been countered. The downside is that the extensive chemotherapy, particularly the person my age, I was 87 when I was diagnosed with cancer. I'm now 91. And at my age, receiving that much chemotherapy has severely and adversely affected a lot of the internal operations of my body. So I don't have any immune system anymore. And I have to be very careful about infections and other cancers. I've had since I started three surgeries to remove other cancers, three hospitalizations to deal with other infections. But every time I complain to the doctor about an acre of pain, he says to me, well, the alternative is worse. And so I celebrated my 91st birthday in August at our home in Maine. And my lovely young daughter, Claire, baked a cake for me. And when I blew out the candle,

she said, well, you got to make a wish. She said, what's your wish? I said, I wish for another birthday. So that's my horizon, reaching 92 next August. Until then, I'll follow your podcast and you guys carefully. George, thank you so much for all of your time. My final question, I want you just to put me out of a misery that is, frankly, keeping me awake at night. Can you tell me with any confidence that Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States? I don't know that. I don't think anybody knows that all of the accounts are that it will be a very close race

and that it will be decided under our system, which has both its strengths and weaknesses, as all political systems do, in about a half a dozen of the so-called swing states. I think the polls appear to be clear that in the rest of the states, it's pretty much settled. The Republican states will vote for former President Trump, and the reliably blue and Democratic states will vote for Vice President Harris. but I think the outcome is very much open, probably to events that will occur between now and the election. Well, listen, thank you so much for your time. I think what you should do, you know, I think you need to sit down in front of a microphone and talk into it about everything we've been talking about, but do it over several days.

Because I could listen to you all day talking about the Irish stuff. and I think you've made such a contribution to history there that that's got to be recorded and I hope you're doing something like that, that wonderful university. I just do want to close with one point. First, I'm here at Queen's University and one of the great pleasures and joys on my life has been my affiliation with Queen's University. After I completed my work in the peace process, I became the Chancellor of Queens where I served for 10 years, and I've still affiliated with it. It's a great institution, not only of higher learning,

but of general contribution to the society in Northern Ireland. And the second is Irish, and I'll close on a very personal note. My father's parents and family all came from Ireland, but he knew nothing about Ireland. As I said early, he was raised by a family of immigrants from Lebanon. I never heard him say the word. He never owned a car. when I was a kid growing up, so we never literally never went anywhere. So he had no understanding or appreciation of his Irish heritage. I've been blessed by the fact that late in my life, I have had the opportunity to be exposed to the warmth, generosity, and hospitality of the people of Ireland, north and south. My family and I have been treated with wonderful warmth. And I like to

think that I'm the principal beneficiary of my experience in Ireland because I'd like to think my father's looking down and understanding and appreciating the fact that I now have a sense of his heritage, which he never had and never could have had. And so for me, it's been a blessing. I'm an American, proud of it, will forever consider myself an American, but a very large part of my heart and my emotions are here in Ireland, and particularly in Northern Ireland with the people here. Well, that's lovely to hear, and it's great to see you. Thank you. Thank you, Senator, very much. Thank you. Thank you, Roar. Great. So, Alistair, thank you for that. I got a sense, I think, of why he was so good at peace negotiations, why he's such a sort of calming presence and an unusual listener for a

politician. Well, and it's interesting that that module that I talked about at the United States Institute of piece. And the qualities that one of the model answers gives is that the qualities you need are to be impartial, trustworthy, adaptable, flexible, creative, calm, patient, knowledgeable and respectful. And he's definitely all of those things. We didn't really get into the patience much, but one of my lasting impressions of him during that whole time was, he mentioned General de Chastelin and former Prime Minister Hulkeary, just how much time they spent in hotel rooms waiting for things to happen because they were just sort of dependent upon other people coming to agreement and then bringing it back into the centre, as it were. So incredible patients. I thought it was wonderful.

For 91, he's had several years being treated for cancer. And yet he spoke incredibly clearly with amazing recall, historical perspective, and his voice is still strong. I thought it was just wonderful. I thought it was lovely. I think one of the things that I noticed, and maybe this is, I don't know whether it's a personality thing or whether it's an age thing. He tends to move quite quickly to the sort of moral, the sort of big philosophical lesson around peacebuilding. So I would have liked, and maybe sometime it would be great if somebody could catch him to do it, more of a sense of the personality of someone like Ian Pacey or more of a sense of what it's like dealing with Netanyahu. But maybe his strength, maybe what lets him do the job is that that

isn't really how he sees the world. If he was somebody who was more kind of acutely conscious of sort of personality and anecdote, maybe he wouldn't be as good as bringing people together. Well, it was interesting the point that he made that when Paisley used to do this with all of them, but it was interesting that George Mitchell was saying there that he never felt the need to rebut or respond. And I think that is very much putting yourself in that position of not taking things personally and seeing yourself as the mediator. And that means that you have to talk to all sides and try to develop trust with all sides. And to be fair, I think that's exactly what he did.

And you saw as well, you sort of dotted through the interview, he was trying to be, at one point he's talking up Billy Hutchison, who was right on the edge of kind of paramilitary unionism, and then at the next he's saying how marvellous Michael Ancrum was. And a very, very positive mindset. I mean, it's so hard, you and I say this all the time, it's so hard to be positive at the moment about American politics, about, you know, what's happening in the Middle East

or about what's happening in Ukraine. But he keeps that sense of optimism burning all the time. That's a pretty amazing thing. It's also an amazing story that you've brought out about his family. So Waterville, Maine, which is the kind of center of the life where his brothers continue to be, it's like a little town of 15,000 people. And his brother, who I think was called Swisher Mitchell, was like this incredible basketball star. But a bit like, I guess, the current US Vice Presidential pick,

he then became the college basketball coach. So he was coach Mitchell and stayed his whole life more. They all lived into their 90s, but all their obituaries are about these sort of wonderful local characters. You know, fine young business leader, ran the local insurance company, coached the local basketball team, but very much focused on this little town of 15,000 people in Maine and their amazing success in basketball in the mid-1940s. And yet he lived this totally different life. I mean, couldn't be more international, as you say, Arnand, Middle East, U.S. Senator. What we didn't make clear in the interview was that the reason we're talking about the Middle East is having been successful in Northern Ireland, Barack Obama and then asked him to be the envoy in the Middle East. I think also I was very moved by what he was saying at the end there about his feeling that he could feel an Irish heritage that his father hadn't felt despite being of Irish heritage.

I thought that was really, really moving. I wonder how disappointed he feels about the Middle East process. I mean, it must have been very interesting to go from making progress. to Northern Ireland with all the expectations which Obama brought into that process and with that huge reputation as somebody who contributed to bring peace and all none to then find yourself hitting that brick wall. And of course, he kept avoiding my question. The truth is, despite saying you've got to talk to terrorists, he wouldn't talk to Hamas. No, exactly. Good. Well, I enjoyed that, and I hope our listeners do too. Thank you very much for organizing it.