Of U2 and old people

Great news out of Ireland today, as the unity government between the Protestants and Catholics offically sits in power. I'm honestly surprised that more people, especially libs, aren't talking about this marvelous turn of events, and what it does and does not signify for Iraq.

The similarities are, to my mind, fairly telling. Religious parties which are so resolutely separated as to almost be different ethnicities. The numerically minor party holding power, propped up by an external power for geopolitical reasons (Britain in Ireland, the US and generally the anti-communist West during the Cold War in Iraq). Even a major violent event bringing simmering tensions to a head (Bloody Sunday in '72, the bombing of the Samarra Mosque).

What can we learn from Ireland? For one thing, these types of problems are only solved politically. The IRA was never going to be defeated militarily; in a country that holds even vague hopes of being an open democracy, it's just not possible to kill a dedicated movement like that. Likewise, while the IRA could make it miserable for the Britons to be there, they couldn't actually defeat them. So the solution was only going to come when they were able to sit down and talk to one another.

The problem, however, is that this only happened with the passage of time. Fighting a war is a young man's game, and the key, I think, to this problem being solved is that none of the young men really know what they were fighting about anymore. Bloody Sunday was 35 years ago. To a 23-year-old, that's basically the same as if it happened in neolithic times. And while there has been some violence, it had been cooled to the point that there just weren't so many 18, 19, 20 year olds who grew up with personal experience of it. Once that level went below some critical mass (either raw number- or population-wise, I'm not sure), then a political solution became viable.

So, I'm confident that solutions can be found in Iraq. They will come politically. But it's going to take time. A lot of time. And let's be honest; we aren't going to get this done with 8,000 advisory troops stationed there. For a country that big, it will take a lot of troops to keep the peace at some sort of level where people can grow old without being personally exposed to enough violence that the seeds of hate germinate for another generation.

This isn't a value judgement. To some extent, I think that we owe it to the Iraqis, having fucked over their country 8 different ways from Sunday, not to simply pull out and let them fight to the death for the hell of it. But we have to be honest about the cost and, more to the point, honest about the fact that this was an almost inevitable outcome of our attempt to install democracy in a place with so many deeply-held visceral hatreds, and what it means for future such attempts in the Middle East and other parts of the world.