David McKittrick: The lessons Northern Ireland holds for Iraq

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

In the index of Tony Blair's memoirs, the word IRA is going to be right next to the word Iraq. It will be an ironic juxtaposition of one of his enterprises that worked and one that has not.

The fact that the Army was yesterday able to stand down its Northern Ireland operation after almost four gruelling decades is a sign that even the most intractable conflicts can eventually be settled. A region that was long a symbol of discord has become a beacon of hope. Belfast is not Basra, and there are huge differences between the two conflicts, but perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the Northern Irish experience.

This applies on both the military and political fronts. First, it hardly needs saying that these things take time, as the duration of the Northern Ireland violence all too plainly indicates. The fact also has to be faced that armies, no matter how professional and well trained, learn slowly. In 1972, the IRA managed to kill 100 soldiers in a single year - that is, three full years after the Army arrived.

As this illustrates, the best-equipped national army can struggle against irregular forces which often use irregular weapons. In particular, the IRA proved especially ingenious in home-made explosive devices.

It may seem ridiculous to think of baked bean tins having a place in warfare, but the IRA, using plastic explosives and cunning adaptation, was able to penetrate military armour and claim soldiers' lives. Millions of pounds had to be spent on counter-measures. It is also vitally important to minimise friction between troops and civilians, since this can have hugely counter-productive results. A surprising number of IRA members, for example, tell of getting involved following apparently trivial incidents.

Events such as Bloody Sunday certainly swelled republican ranks, but so too did apparently casual brushes. Young locals would complain that soldiers shoved them around, made them remove their socks and shoes, mocked them in front of a girlfriend or insulted their parents. Later, soldiers would die at the hands of disaffected youths who turned into hardened terrorists after suffering what seemed minor personal indignities.

In the political arena, many lessons were learned the hard way. Maybe the most important, which took much time to get through, was that outright victory was not in prospect. In the early days the authorities hoped to defeat the IRA, while the IRA believed it could drive the British into the sea.

Long, bloodstained years were to pass before the realisation began to dawn that neither Britain nor the IRA were ever going to surrender to each other. The recognition of this reality did not end the violence: that continued for many more years. But it led to a period of brooding introspection, much of it among imprisoned activists, as various elements came to grips with a central question: if victory is not possible, then what is?

For most, this was an unwelcome question, but as time went by it became an inescapable issue. Eventually this led on to dialogue across different groups.

To begin with, both the processes of debate and dialogue were conducted in strict secrecy, accompanied by repeated denials that anything of this type was going on at all. Again, violence continued while clandestine contacts went on, but eventually a subculture of negotiation developed. Quite apart from the wider issues, the violence itself was an issue, with the authorities pressing for ceasefires and the IRA demanding concessions in return.

Relationships developed among the protagonists and various go-betweens, with a certain amount of give-and-take. What did not develop was trust, yet this did not prove an insuperable obstacle. Each side in fact took it for granted that all the others were unscrupulous, up to all sorts of tricks and needed to be watched like a hawk. With this as a given, protagonists got used to the idea of conducting business on a basis of mutually anticipated perfidy.

This slowed things down but did not stop them. Nor did the shrill voices, from various points of the political compass, of those who argued that a peace process was bad in itself and should be summarily abandoned. At some point, the adversaries decided that the exercise was worth continuing, telling themselves and the doubting elements in their ranks that nothing they were doing would remove their capacity to return to full-blown war.

Personalities and relationships were important. The partnership of prime ministers Blair and Ahern was hugely significant, as was the involvement of Bill Clinton; later the scores of meetings Blair had with the Sinn Fein leaders Adams and McGuinness produced valuable results. A key point was that, even as the din of battle continued, opponents came to believe that others had abandoned the idea of seeking submission and were instead open to the emergence of some form of honourable compromise.

Once this happened, opponents remained at odds yet at the same time had a sense that a certain overlapping of interests was developing, in the sense that almost everyone wanted to avoid a return to war. Thrashing out the terms of a compromise took more than a decade marked by repeated crises, including violent incidents, political upheavals and long periods of apparent stalemate.

Yet in the latter years, once some sort of negotiating framework has been established, gratuitous acts of violence lost their power to blow the process apart and instead seemed to increase the determination to see it through. In Northern Ireland the tragic case in point was the Omagh bomb, with which dissident republicans killed 29 people some months after the historic 1998 agreement was signed. At an earlier stage that might have wrecked everything; instead those innocent deaths cemented the peace by providing the most graphically terrible reminder of the alternative to a peace process.

This was partly because of the immense power of the sense, when it finally arrives, that peace is an idea whose time has come. It take years for this to permeate the more extreme elements but, in Belfast at any rate, the idea that peace was achievable generated surges of hope and energy.

It may be that at this juncture emotions in Iraq are too raw for a peace process to take root. Yet it is probably never too early to try to lay the groundwork for some future phase in which realism and pragmatism can take root. At some stage, the ambition for victory will hopefully give way to an acknowledgement of the inevitability of a negotiated settlement. For many, that will be an unpalatable thought, yet that is the lesson of the Belfast experience of war and peace.