Irish revolutionary violence.

IRELAND once again stands at the threshold of war, and it took the collective genius of the governments of the United States, Britain, and the Republic of Ireland and a credulous, absurdly optimistic media to help put it there. The peace process, cosseted by so many, questioned by so few, and supposedly designed to end Ireland's quarter-century of war, was merely a ploy, an interim tactic by the IRA, now finished. More than peace is dead. So too is trust.

Without trust, all talks are worthless: the undertaking of an evening could be as insubstantial by morning as the tobacco smoke of the room it was given in. Two years ago, the IRA gave its word to everybody -- to the Irish government, to the British, and finally, to the American: The war is over. President Clinton was photographed shaking hands with the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams; and at that very moment, back in Ireland, the IRA was assembling the bomb which was to destroy the vast Canary Wharf complex in London's docklands, killing two men working there and doing $150 million worth of damage.

The war is over. These words bamboozled so many people, most notably the American ambassador, Jean Kennedy Smith. She was not the first nor the last, for she has the desire of most decent people to see a reasonable end to a tragic war. That very desire is among the most powerful weapons the IRA possesses.

The IRA's leaders are past masters at deploying the institutions of the state and the law and the softer emotions of their audience and enemy as war weapons. Understand this clearly: the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein, are fighting a total war. Everything within a society is to be bent toward achieving their goals: Brits out of Northern Ireland and a single Irish state, regardless of the wishes of the people of Ireland.

It is both a criminal and an impracticable ambition: a state of 3.5 million people cannot forcibly absorb over a million violently hostile citizens whose very definition of themselves is that they are people who are not governed by the rest of the people of Ireland. Sinn Fein, campaigning in recent elections on a peace ticket -- God help us -- secured the votes of perhaps 10 per cent of the total electorate, including the stay-at-homes. Such a minority cannot assert its will over a majority.

But is it typical of Sinn Fein - IRA to think otherwise. They combine technical brilliance with an abysmal understanding of human nature. They are in a way idiots savants, phenomenally gifted cretins who are more single-minded than their enemies (other than their loyalist counterparts: equally singular, equally vile).

Gerry Adams exemplifies this tunnel vision. He is represented in the U.S. as a peacemaker. He is not. He wants to win his war, preferably by peaceful means. But his bottom-line political demand is for a British withdrawal from Ireland -- i.e., victory.

This has been a long haul for Gerry Adams. He joined the IRA in the mid 1960s when it had dwindled to a tiny band of zealots in Belfast crooning over a cooling hearth. His father had been in the IRA since the 1940s and was a friend of Tom Williams and Joe Cahill, who were in an IRA unit that shot dead a Catholic policeman in West Belfast in 1942.

Five men, including Cahill, were sentenced to death for this killing. The U.S. ambassador to Dublin urged moderation, and Cahill and three others were reprieved. It was not the last time Cahill would benefit from American diplomatic pressure. Last year, as part of the peace process, Ambassador Smith secured him an entry visa to the U.S., where he became perhaps the first convicted cop-killer feted by American cops.

HIS friend Tom Williams, just 19, was executed. Loyalists exulted, Republicans mourned. It was a hideous business. Curiously enough, Williams's brother was a volunteer in the Royal Air Force at the time, and a young Catholic neighbor, serving with the Royal Navy, was the only Northern Ireland man to win the Victoria Cross in the Second World War.

I bring this up to illustrate the fact that Northern Ireland's Catholics are not a single community with a single set of values. There are diverse strands running through it, of which the most obvious and noisiest, combining aggression and self-pity, is Sinn Fein - IRA, whose balladeers sing of Tom Williams to this day; but not, needless to say, of poor dead Constable Murphy.

Adams Senior and Joe Cahill clung to their "Republicanism" as Northern Ireland prospered in the 1960s. Most Catholics felt no enthusiasm for the Protestant-dominated state they lived in, but were prepared to tolerate it if they got a fair deal. A handful of IRA men, regarded as odd, hermit-like creatures, continued to worship the tradition of the gun, which came into its own when a civil-rights campaign collapsed in violence.

The gun was and is the core of the IRA, almost what the Eucharist is to the Catholic. The arms dump evokes not just a military reverence, but a continuity. Two centuries ago, it was the pike in the thatch which was the totem around which would-be insurgents gathered; today it is the Kalashnikov, given by the IRA's good friend Colonel Qaddafi.

For Irish "Republicanism" is not republican in any platonic sense, and, in its enthusiasm for socialism and statism, absolutely not in the American sense. It claims ancestry from the Irish enthusiasts -- mostly Protestant -- for the French Revolution two centuries ago, from which it takes the word "republican"; but the real inspiration of present Irish Republicanism emerged during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Its leader, Patrick Pearse, and the Sinn Fein founder, Arthur Griffiths, both hoped a German prince could be persuaded to rule an independent Ireland.

Irish Republicanism is separatist, conspiratorial, authoritarian, violent, deeply Catholic, self-pitying, anti-democratic. It has no understanding of the concept of civil liberties. However, it has fantastic cultural energy and humor. Some of the finest Irish writers of this century -- Sean O Faolain, Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty -- were for a while members of the IRA.

This outer creativity, this ability to charm and to beguile with intelligence and wit and rollicking balladry, suggests to outsiders that Sinn Fein is progressive and enlightened. It is not. True, the politics of Sinn Fein today are more right-on, AIDS-chairperson-sensitive than in previous generations. But that is the window dressing to an ancient conspiracy which seeks the destruction of the Northern Ireland state.

Gerry Adams revived Sinn Fein for that purpose. Sinn Fein and the IRA are Siamese twins, sharing the same blood and heart and internal organs; they have two heads, but those heads think virtually the same thing at the same time. They are indivisibly one, made possible by the political obstetrician, Gerry Adams.

Gerry Adams is not running the IRA these days. Others do it now full time, while full time he appears in public, sympathetic and distraught, distributing condolences to those most recently made legless or orphaned or blinded. He has made this war his own, drawing on the full range of weaponry which the modern liberal state offers to those who oppose it -- law, trial, liberties, a free press, and even supermarkets where a skilled bomb-maker can buy all he needs to destroy a city.

Adams remains forceful and impressive, intimidating interviewers and dodging questions in a way no ordinary politician could get away with. Sinn Fein - IRA play the victimhood card so often and well that it is impossible to say how much they actually believe it themselves. West Belfast and Derry have been the recipients of the biggest central-government-funded housing projects in the history of the United Kingdom. The British government has studded Belfast with leisure centers and Olympic swimming pools. Yet Sinn Fein leaders tearfully say that West Belfast is the Soweto of Northern Ireland.

How can they keep a straight face uttering such garbage? Because they are astoundingly single-minded in their ambition: Brits out and a united Ireland, regardless of who wants it. Everything --human lives in whatever number, the prosperity of the Irish people, and certainly mere abstracts like the truth -- can be sacrificed for that central goal.

Gerry Adams realized a decade ago that Sinn Fein - IRA had not got the political clout to deliver on the violence it could inflict. Lots of big bangs, loads of dead bodies, but then what? He needed to mobilize the broader family of Irish nationalism, which detests violence, but without that community fully realizing it was being used.

He succeeded brilliantly in this political parasitism, firstly by talks with John Hume, the leader of the constitutional nationalists of Northern Ireland, the SDLP, and an uncompromising opponent of violence. He convinced Hume that he was sick of war, which he probably was -- 25 years of butchery is a long time. But he had not abandoned his goal -- a united Ireland, somehow to be talked into existence.

It cannot be talked into existence, any more than the Space Shuttle can be talked into orbit. A British withdrawal against the wishes of the people of Northern Ireland would not mean a united Ireland. It would mean Bosnia. But enough people were gathered on this roller-coaster of well-intentioned flannel called the Peace Process. The gunmen stood back, and waited for Northern Ireland to be delivered to them.

But this was impossible. The majority of the people in the province remain totally committed to the union. IRA delegations met Irish and British government ministers, but not the unionists. The only item on the agenda could be what the unionists would never discuss -- the union with Great Britain. Intransigent? Maybe. But precisely what do you say to somebody who wishes to abolish the state and identity you cherish? What cozy words does the state governor in Austin utter over coffee to temporarily quiescent terrorists demanding the return of Texas to Mexico? "Get out," perhaps?

While the ceasefire lasted, Gerry the peacemaker had to get what Gerry the IRA leader had failed to get -- Brits out. He played the diplomatic card, and brilliantly. The U.S. was drawn into the process. President Clinton's aversion to Prime Minister Major no doubt gave American involvement an extra impetus: here was the U.S. sorting out tired old Britain's problems, again. Ambassador Smith had taken an unusually vigorous interest in Irish affairs. She and her brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, convinced the Administration -- against the strenuous advice of the State Department, which placed primacy on Anglo-American relations --that since Sinn Fein - IRA wanted permanent peace, it would be worth antagonizing the British government with a brief involvement in internal UK affairs.

But once engagement in Northern Ireland begins, it is rather like a shirt-tail being caught by agricultural machinery. So other members of the Administration were sucked in -- Nancy Soderberg, Anthony Lake, George Stephanopoulos. Miss Soderberg cheerfully described American engagement as a win - win situation for the Administration.

Little did she know. Win - win is the key in Northern Ireland. Everybody wants win - win. Sinn Fein - IRA, for example, did want peace. They also wanted victory. Win - win. They genuinely believed that the U.S. could pressure the British to get out, leaving in their wake, miraculously, a united Ireland, presto. This is the fantasy which results from too much dope (though you have to inhale an awful lot, Mr. President). Far less dopy was the involvement of Senator George Mitchell, who chaired an international commission on disarmament in Northern Ireland, and made it all seem miraculously possible, though it is not. It all culminated in the Clinton - Adams photograph just as Adams's colleagues were preparing to bomb the bejesus out of the U.S.'s closest military ally in Europe, with, no doubt, old hands in the State Department murmuring, "I told you so."

The bomb exploded before all-party talks, scheduled for the end of February, could begin. After that, complete all-party talks have proved impossible to arrange. With bizarre logic, Sinn Fein - IRA have presented themselves to their own constituency as victims of the exclusion their bombs achieved. For what little trust Sinn Fein might have engendered during the Peace Process -- and frankly it was very little indeed among the Protestant community -- is now completely gone. The most recent IRA bomb in Manchester was not pre-conversational terrorist skirmishing. It devastated the heart of England's third city and injured over two hundred people. Only by the greatest good fortune was nobody killed. It occurred at the height of the European soccer championship in England, and was clearly a strategic assault on the British tourism industry, Britain's biggest source of foreign money. Such deeds by one state to another would be casus belli. In fact the first tourist industry to be damaged was Ireland's -- the Irish Tourist Board reported a 15 per cent drop in British enquiries about Irish vacations, though this would not influence IRA deeds. The wealth and welfare of the Irish people count for nothing in the perverse Sinn Fein - IRA view of the world.

THERE is talk of another IRA ceasefire. Sinn Fein - IRA are adept at playing on hope, and the Irish media have been especially credulous. They have been drip-fed stories about the "peace faction" in Sinn Fein - IRA, when there is no peace faction: there is only the victory faction, united and indivisible and determined to bring an end to the Northern Ireland state. Meanwhile poor George Mitchell has found himself appointed to be the chairman of all-party talks in Belfast, which to date have been neither all-party nor talks. And talk of an imminent ceasefire has, as intended, paralyzed political will in Dublin, where the government is reluctant to get tough on the IRA lest it wreck the dovelike ambitions of the "peace faction." Sinn Fein -IRA constitutes the cleverest, most single-minded, most ruthless terrorist-guerrilla organization in the world, and they have a political leader to match.

But those qualities are not enough to achieve victory. The political culture of Northern Ireland consists of the dogged renewal of ancient disputes in fresh guises. Win - win is impossible, as George Mitchell is discovering.