President Obama and Northern Ireland

[Apparatchik]

In his book, Jonathan Powell, the Tony Blair aide who helped negotiate the Northern Irish power-sharing agreement observes of Blair and himself, ‘we were of a younger generation and the war against Irish terrorism was not our war’.

The Financial Times this week says it's important to appreciate that many in the British government see this experience as a model for future dealings with radical Muslim groups in the Middle East and inside Europe. And they will be pushing that model on a President Obama - very hard and probably very successfully.

The change of administration in Washington will give the US and its friends a chance to reflect and recalibrate. The starting point is to stop talking about a war.
Eventual success in Northern Ireland flowed from a strategy of “never letting the talking stop”. There is a moral to be drawn here for the US administration’s stop-go efforts to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians. ...

Mr Blair [and Mr. Bush] sometimes spoke in ... Manichean terms [about Islamic terrorism] , evoking a global ideological struggle that could be with us for generations. The effect has been to impose a homogeneity on armed groups in the Islamic world that defies the realities of their very different aims and methods. ... In real life, there is a lot more light and shade. Not all Muslims – even among those prepared to use violence in pursuit of their cause – think alike. ..

A mindset that lumps together Hizbollah with al-Qaeda, Hamas with Iraq’s Shia militia or Kurdish separatists with the Taliban under the rubric of a single struggle is one that does al-Qaeda’s bidding. It excludes recognition of genuine grievances, ignores the impact of western policy and rules out any prospect of some extremists being won over to politics.

[Squire Allworthy]

Whoever the President of the US is the lesson to learn from NI is you can't have peace until those at 'war' have had enough of it. The participants must want peace, they must be at a point where they realise the conflict is pointless. They must be infiltrated with spies, used, corrupted, demoralised and mislead. For if there is one spark of hope of victory they will plod on regardless of the carnage.

Of course keep talking but lets not get to idealistic. People who murder innocent people to achieve a political objective (on any side) are not likely to concede anything over cucumber sandwiches. Obama's go talk to these people modus can also go very wrong if those you talk to are using such occasions for their own political purposes.

[Apparatchik]

I take your point about spies. You probably need a leader like Adams with the ruthlessness to play both sides against the middle.