Let’s examine what we’ve got here…

  • A nation with artificial borders, created by foreigners.
  • A sharp sectarian divide with a history of actual war between the sects.
  • Relentless conflict, horrifying terrorism, intractable foes.
  • Heavily armed militias, car bombs, the slaughter of innocents.
  • A heavy-handed and sometimes brutal foreign power trying to maintain peace while stirring up more war.
  • Children being raised in the heat of these battles, losing loved ones, creating a new generation of combatants.

… and, quite possibly, it’s all over now.

I’m sure I’m not the first to point this out, and I shouldn’t be the last.

When I was a kid, Ireland was the problem that wasn’t going to go away in my lifetime (well, that and disco). Communism might fall, but the tragedy of Ireland was that too much blood had been shed, the various factions were too intractable, fanaticism and revenge too strong as motivators. The leaders of the various factions were terrorists, evil, filthy, crazy-eyed terrorists, and the idea of ever negotiating with any of them or their organizations was unthinkable - you’d be talking to people with blood on their hands and violent friends, people who couldn’t be trusted, leopards don’t change their spots, and besides, what kind of precedent are we setting fo-

Whatever. With luck, all that is now over.

It’s been a long process. And backsliding can always happen when you’re trying to change habits - just ask every dog I’ve ever owned (after he’s done hanging his head in shame he might mutter some sort of confession regarding a suspicious spot on the rug)(for that matter, I myself occasionally have to make confessions about certain spots on the rug…). But one thing that’s really encouraging is that it now seems unthinkable that a solution in Ireland was ever unthinkable.

There are differences between Ireland and Iraq. Sure. I don’t think the Iraqis have learned how to make a decent whiskey, for example, and that’s a problem, culturally. But some of the differences are linguistic. Our President attributes everything that’s going on in Baghdad as the product of “an ideology of hate.” I’d rather think of it as “very religious people with a political gripe.” Address the gripe, even partially, and the absolutism tends to disappear. Suddenly clerics discover room for tolerance previously hidden in the holy texts, and God doesn’t seem to thirst for heathen blood as much as He used to and instead starts talking a lot more about sending thine children to a decent college…

Iraq’s harder. I don’t know how we’re gonna solve this one. But it CAN be solved. One hint though - remember that gigantic military surge in Ireland that stifled the violence and forced the population to lay down their arms and start talking in peaceful terms?

Me neither.