Ah, I see you've swallowed the UK Government’s Golden Bridge and Propaganda Of The Peace Process completely without question. 🤦♂️
The Sunningdale and Anglo-Irish Agreement eras both demonstrate to us all that the IRA would NOT have given up violence unless they were made to do so by the State's security forces. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the IRA would have given up violence in the 1990s for any other reason than defeat.
As long as fundamentalist terrorist groups believe they can win based on the prevailing health of their organisation, they’ll continue to use violence in aid of their objectives.
Once weakened, such groups will see their leadership drop their previously fundamentalist position and agree to whatever conditions the sovereign power or powers impose. This then is defeat.
"Statesmanship consists not merely in the wisdom of your proposals, but in the choosing of the right moment. My right hon. Friend the Member for Paisley..........knows what it is to settle an action, and he knows it depends upon your choosing exactly the moment.
You must not choose it when the parties are full of fight, when they are confident they are going to win, when they are confident, not merely in the justice of their case, but in the invincibility of their counsel. Who can stand against it? That is not the time to settle. You have got to wait until difficulties have cropped up which they had never foreseen, when doubt begins to enter their minds as to the completeness of their victory, when the costs are mounting up, and the only smile is on the face of the solicitor, when they are tired out by pleadings and counter-pleadings and all the delays and wearing mechanism of the law. That is the time.
But if you propose too soon, it means not merely that you fail then, but that you interpose obstacles in the way of settling at the right time."
- David Lloyd George, the then Prime Minister, in the House of Commons on 14 December 1921.
In other words, you have to know when the enemy is defeated in order to impose conditions for a peace process.
That's why Frankie Quinn, senior member of the PIRA's East Tyrone brigade, said the following:
"We were saying the armed struggle’s failed, it can’t win. The jails are filling up, people are dying left, right and centre and the British are getting the better hand on us.
Obviously we knew in our hearts that we were deeply, deeply infiltrated at a very high level.
The armed struggle had to stop. We’d dump weapons, call the ceasefire, and then go into talks."
That's a sincere acknowledgement of defeat from a senior member of PIRA.
Another member of PIRA, Kieran Conway agreed with this and said the following:
"The attrition rate was just so appalling.
The SAS, the British intelligence services were obviously in a position to intercept most operations.
It was absolutely clear that we were losing if we hadn’t already lost the war and that it was time to cash in the chips.”
PIRA member John Crawley, an ex-US Marine before joining PIRA, asserted:
"It was a defeat for the Republican Movement, a complete military and ideological defeat across the board that opened up career paths for certain members of the leadership, but left us ideologically destroyed."
Crawley also described the British as "masters at counter-insurgency".
For PSF/PIRA anything less than total and outright victory is defeat.
This is defeat.
To go back to David Lloyd George's 1921 statement above again, what the British Government did with the IRA in 1920 and 1998 can be summed up by Sun Tzu below:
"A surrounded army must be given a way out. The ancient rule of the charioteers says, “Surround them on three sides, leaving one side open, to show them a way to life. Show them a way to life so that they will not be in the mood to fight to the death…”
An enemy that knows it is defeated in all but name is given a way out to save face and spare further bloodshed. This is known as the Golden Bridge.
And ONLY an enemy that knows it is defeated in all but name WILL take the conditions given by the dominant power.
"The British offered the conditions on which they'd leave this country and those were with the consent of a majority of people in the North. That was the conditions the British offered the IRA and the IRA after fighting that for 25 years suddenly decided to say 'this is a victory'?"
-PIRAs Anthony MacIntyre
That is the position the IRA found itself in 1998. It was defeated and so accepted the conditions of the British Government which had been resolute for most of the 20th Century.
Of course the IRA was defeated.