Fintan O'Toole: In the grim farce of the recent attempts to get the Belfast Agreement back on track, there was one genuinely funny moment. Back in London after things had fallen apart, Tony Blair addressed the House of Commons, though his real audience was David Trimble.
He told MPs he could understand unionist concerns about the transparency of paramilitary decommissioning but tried to assure them that they would be happy if they knew what he knew about the scale of the IRA's third act of decommissioning. At that moment, with one sardonic comment, Trimble could have won the propaganda war hands down. He just needed to wonder out loud whether Tony Blair hadn't asked us before to trust him on the question of weapons and told us that if we knew what he knew about the Iraqi threat, we would all be incredibly impressed.
That no one thought to say this - and indeed that Blair himself seemed completely unaware if the irony of what he was saying - is a mark of the eerie way the war in Iraq has been corralled off from public discourse in the western world. It's not, of course, that the issues are not being debated or that they do not arouse strong feelings among the general population. But for the most part that debate is sealed off in a realm of its own. It is scarcely connected to domestic politics.
This is especially strange in the arena where the vital interest of the Republic is most closely bound up with British politics: the peace process. Although the process started, from a British point of view, with John Major, it was very much Tony Blair's baby. His particular skills - his ability to tell people what they want to hear, his capacity for infectious optimism, his rhetoric of escaping the past - were immensely useful to the making of the deal.
But conversely, just at the point when the key issue of the process has become one of trust, his exposure over Iraq as a fantasist who shapes the truth to suit his own private convictions, is a huge obstacle to the implementation of that deal.
It's not just that Blair's general credibility is shot. It is also that his Iraq policy suggests that his engagement with Northern Ireland was in fact skin deep. He had not in fact thought through the experience of military occupation and terrorism which finally led to the profound change of strategy that resulted in the Belfast Agreement. If he had done so, he would have been a true friend to the US and warned Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell and Wolfowitz just what they were getting into.
This is not about hindsight. Last March, when the war was going fabulously well for the invading forces and the media cheerleading was at its most deafening, I wrote here that anyone who had lived through the Troubles could see that the US and the UK were in fact facing a massive political defeat in Iraq.
I suggested that if he were genuinely friendly to the Americans, the Taoiseach, when he met George Bush on Saint Patrick's Day should tell him about Northern Ireland: "He knows how an army that starts off with good intentions ends up kicking down doors, treating all civilians as potential terrorists and, because it can't afford to take chances, shooting innocent people. He knows how this in turn infuriates and alienates even those civilians who were not initially unsympathetic to the aims of the occupiers. And how the result can be the almost endless disaster of an administration that is in power but not in control and a constant undertow of violence that makes a stable democracy impossible."
I also wrote that "The suffering of the Iraqi people will become steadily worse. The Iraqi opposition's dreams of a model democracy have already dissolved and the most they can inherit is power tainted by a legacy of horrors. The disgusting regime in Baghdad is becoming, in the eyes of much of the Arab world, heroic. The lunatic fringe of Islamic terrorism is being presented with a perfect target . . . the quick, clean war [the US and UK] wanted to fight has already been lost and the slow, brutal one they are now fighting cannot be won, even when Saddam is dead and Baghdad is occupied."
This was not great acuity on my part. It was simply stating what was, to anyone who had lived through the last 35 years on this island, bloody obvious. And there is no pleasure at all in the fulfilment of these predictions. For just as the reaction of the Catholic population to the British army in Belfast created a situation in which the sadists who murdered Jean McConville were able to dictate the political agenda, so the American and British invasion of Iraq has handed control to the kind of psychopath who takes pleasure in bombing the Red Cross.
That Blair could so blithely ignore these lessons from Northern Ireland suggests both that he never actually thought about the place much in the first place and that he is now, with his belief in military solutions and his flagrant untrustworthiness, a problem for the peace process. Whatever happens in the Assembly elections, it is hard to see much hope until Gordon Brown fulfils his destiny.