Department of Analogies

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) was just saying that it's unrealistic to expect Iraq to move swiftly to militia disarmament. After all, look at Northern Ireland where the IRA has just only very recently agreed to lay down arms.

This all seems reasonable to be, except that Smith seems to think this is a data point in favor of his side. It proves, you see, that the GAO scorecard is silly. And maybe so. But peering just a half an inch beneath the analogy is the idea that civil war in Iraq might continue for thirty or forty years before it would be reasonable to expect our policy to start showing results.

Comments

Also that the IRA was solved in large part by negotiating with the terrorists.

Posted by Andrew Edwards | September 10, 2007 3:58 PM

I'm recycling my blog comments, from April '07:

Roughly the same number of people were killed in Iraq in Feb. and March 2007 (3506 dead, BBC) as were killed in the entire history of The Troubles (3524 dead, CAIN). Adjusted for population there was as much killing in Iraq in 30 months as there was in Northern Ireland in 32 years. The death toll in the BBC story cites the Iraqi Health Ministry for it’s figures, figures that are roughly 1/9th of the death toll in the Iraq Mortality Study published in The Lancet. Given all of the above I’m not sure how much credit Gen. Petraeus deserves for making his ridiculous analogy. A better analogy would be Iraqis will have to learn to live with a situation worse than they had under Saddam. (from Crooked Timber comments, 4/23/07)

Crooked Timber already smacked down this 'Fantasy Ireland' talking point.

http://crookedtimber.org/2007/04/22/welcome-to-fantasy-ireland/

Posted by joejoejoe | September 10, 2007 4:07 PM

30 or 40 years? Maybe 400 years. In May 2003 Bush met Blair to discuss post-invasion security. They met in Belfast! These people are crazy. In Max Ophuls great film A Sense of Loss you get a feel for the results of a failed, occupied state. It was made in 1972, merely 1 year after the recently ended troubles began. In the film an unemployed factory worker notes that the boys who used to run from a cop after hitching a ride on the back of a truck now stand and throw rocks at tanks filled with paratroopers. Ulster had it all. No habeaus corpus, illegal prisons, rendition, news blackouts, a civil war and utter failure. Not to mention the development of the world's most effective liberation army. Always remember General Petraeus, mogul of all couterinsurgency, Gerry Adams leads Northern Ireland.

Posted by Peter Driscoll | September 10, 2007 4:07 PM

It'd be premature to talk about disarmament while we're in the middle of, it would seem, escalating armament.

Posted by buermann | September 10, 2007 4:45 PM

Liberation army? The IRA were terrorist scum, bullies pure and simple.

Sorry, but no two ways about it. They might have had nice goals, but they blew up civilians for political purposes. They killed wee kids because the wee kids sat in the wrong bar. They murdered and tortured, and for all their talk about legality, they wouldn't lay down the Armalite for the ballot box.

(Same goes for the UDF, etc., in NI, but you don't get many people idolising Unionist thugs.)

Posted by Jean | September 10, 2007 4:46 PM

Liberation army? The IRA were terrorist scum, bullies pure and simple.

Scum? Bullies? Maybe, Maybe not. Here's the point like it or not: Britain created the worlds most successful Liberation Army. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Just ask Martin Meehan and Gerry Adams.

Posted by Peter Driscoll | September 10, 2007 5:17 PM

The problem with Chris Smith's analogy is that Northern Ireland just isn't comparable to Iraq. In Northern Ireland, the majority Protestant population aligned with the English basically controlled the entire land area of its territory. The IRA undertook acts of violence both within N.I. and Great Britain designed to accomplish certain political ends, but never could challenge the control of the governing powers on a practical level.

The situation in Iraq is nowhere near this coherent. You have Sunnis, Shiites, AQI, and Kurds all with different agendas, not to mention rivalries within the Shiite side itself. You also don't have a central government with any control over its territory, which was certainly not true in N.I.

There is little that can be drawn upon from the Northern Ireland experience that can be applied to our present situation.

Posted by Klein's Tiny Left Nut | September 10, 2007 5:34 PM

Here's the point like it or not: Britain created the worlds most successful Liberation Army.

The war is over and the Brits are still there, no?

To call them more successful than the Viet Cong or the Chinese PLA seems a bit of a stretch . . .

Posted by rea | September 10, 2007 5:52 PM

Yes, scum and bullies. The only reason that Gerry Adams didn't fly planes into London was that he was too thick to think of it.

The IRA co-operated with the Fascists, even while Hitler sent true patriots of every country in Europe to the camps. They bombed pubs in England, contrary to all rules of law, morality, and humanity. The IRA's armed activities are classified as terrorism by the vast majority of political parties inside Ireland, both North and South.

The IRA are only off the lists of terrorist organisations in the EU and so forth because they have ceased terrorist activities. They are still thugs and murderers.

If you think that the IRA liberated anyone, you're mad. They shot Catholics on hearsay, and didn't even bother with that for Protestants. If you take them as a role model, then you really need help.

Posted by Jean | September 10, 2007 5:52 PM

There is little that can be drawn upon from the Northern Ireland experience that can be applied to our present situation.

Except to show that an occupying army can take an oppressed minority within a majority and create heroes and martyrs out of thugs and bullies through techniques used in NI and Iraq. To be sure this wasn't Smith's or Petreaus' point. It does make you wonder what they were thinking or who Princeton is giving PhD's in counterinsurgency to.

Posted by Peter Driscoll | September 10, 2007 5:54 PM

Alot of emotion flying around. My point, which I appear not to have made very well, is that not only was it a bad analogy in that it proves the opposite of the presumed intent of its makers but that it also demonstrated how easily misled Bush was about how to secure a country for an occupation. Whatever you think of the means or ends in NI, the results are the opposite of Britain's intentions. And to me, that looks like trouble for the Long World Wide War Against Global Islamofascism of Mass Destruction or whatever it is that we are doing there now. But I don't have a PhD from Princeton.

Posted by Peter Driscoll | September 10, 2007 6:04 PM

I know and work with people who have Ph.D's from Princeton, and they aren't so down with this whole Surge thing; on the other hand, their Ph.Ds (unlike Petraeus' and O'Hanlon's) aren't in killing people.

Posted by Cicero Dude | September 10, 2007 6:52 PM

Except for the fact that the Shiites in this analogy are the Irish, and the Ulster Unionists
are the Sunnis. The Brits are the Sunni cousins
in Saudi Arabia and Syria. N. Ireland is the
proof that terrorism does work; The Canary Wharf
bombings in 1993; roughly comparable to 1st WTC
attack opened up the negotiations; Gerry Adams was then legitimized as well as Martin McGuiness; who apparently thinks it's a smart thing to reveal
secret negotiations of Iraqi factions in Stockholm. Of course with the exception of the Three Kings; there's been no film to humanize the Shia. The Sunni insurgents get the Irish treatment
all the time

Posted by narciso | September 10, 2007 8:06 PM

The salient point isn't how long we might be in Iraq, but what the situation on the ground will look like in the next couple of years. If we go from the current level of troop commitment and violence to, say, an Afghanistan-like low-boil in the next couple of years, I think most Americans would consider that sufficient progress to continue to try to stabilize Iraq. If five years from now, we have, say, 20k troops in Iraq and they're not getting shot at on a daily basis, few will be clamoring for withdrawal.

Posted by Fred | September 11, 2007 10:42 AM