Fintan O'Toole: In just a few hours last Thursday, around a thousand civilians were massacred in a co-ordinated assault on 15 villages in north-eastern Congo.
Some of the attackers were Congolese, but many seem to have been members of the Ugandan army. The atrocity was just the latest episode in an international confrontation that has gone on for four years and claimed perhaps two million lives.
Yet today, even while another war rages in Iraq, the eyes of the world will be drawn, however briefly, to a squalid little squabble in north-eastern Ireland. It is, by the hideous standards of our times, a mere footnote in the history of horrors. Even its peculiarities - a long-running, sporadically violent political dispute between two almost indistinguishable groups - are not all that peculiar. A very similar situation in Jamaica, where last autumn's general election was hailed as a great success because only about 50 people were killed during the campaign, gets vastly less attention.
This is not to make light of the suffering in Northern Ireland over the last 35 years. The human cost of the conflict has been terrible and it should be burned far more deeply into the minds of everyone in this archipelago than it has been. But there is a sense in which the wildly disproportionate attention paid to it has become a part of the problem.
A magnifying glass doesn't just make things seem bigger, it can also set them alight. Jumped-up little thugs love swaggering around as brigadier generals and chiefs-of-staff, and being told that you are part of global history completes the illusion. Even decent democratic politicians find it hard to be competing, not for a Nobel Prize, but for control of the Magherafelt sanitation budget.
Many people from all sides have made that move with genuine grace, but the peace process is still caught up in conflicting gestures. On the one hand, for the Belfast Agreement to have been possible the world needed to create an atmosphere of heroic drama. On the other, for the agreement to actually work, everybody needs to stop striking heroic poses and become boringly mundane.
This is why, at one level, today's Bush-Blair-Ahern summit is truly deplorable. With such momentous events unfolding in the big, bad world, the presence of the US President feeds the illusion that the fate of Northern Ireland is one of the great issues of the early 21st century. If, with both the war and his own Presidency entering their crucial phase, George W. Bush can still find time to discuss the composition of the Policing Board, it must really be of world-historical significance.
The truth, however, is that Northern Ireland's usefulness at this moment in the Bush Presidency lies precisely in its relative insignificance. It can be used as a piece of theatre: a nice gesture to Tony Blair, a peace-making photo-opportunity to counterpoint the images of war on Fox News.
The irony, however, is that, at an entirely different level, the Belfast Agreement really does have global significance. The conflict itself may be, in planetary terms, marginal. But the attempts to solve it have produced a model that still bears an enormous burden of hope for the rest of the world.
The simultaneous recognition by a successful terrorist movement that its violence cannot succeed and by democratic governments that there are no military solutions to political problems means even more now than it did five years ago.
However grotesque the conjunction of the Iraqi war and the Irish peace process, it does offer a rare opportunity to make this place matter. The Belfast Agreement was the product of what turned out to be a short period of optimism, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. It was shaped by a vision of the 21st century as a time in which the politics of brute force would be left behind and a creative alternative would be embraced.
Even as that vision is being obscured by the fires of Baghdad, Irish politicians have been given, albeit for the most cynical reasons, the chance to make it visible again. Not in inflated rhetoric, but in the quiet, undramatic embrace of democratic responsibility. Especially for those like Gerry Adams who oppose the Iraq war, there is a unique opportunity to give Bush the most powerful answer of all: the full and final disavowal of violence.
And maybe, just maybe, the Taoiseach will have the guts simply to repeat to George W. Bush the words of that great American, George Mitchell, as he stood in front of the cameras five years ago and announced that a deal had been reached: "This agreement proves that democracy works, and in its wake we can say to the men of violence, to those who disdain democracy, whose tools are bombs and bullets: Your way is not the right way.
"You will never solve the problems of Northern Ireland by violence. You will only make them worse."
Delete Northern Ireland and insert any one of a hundred names and you have a genuine message for the world.