Earlier this week, as thousands of Iraqi people took to the streets of Basra to celebrate their liberation at the hands of the coalition allies, a much smaller crowd gathered near Hillsborough.
They came to denounce as warmongers and criminals George Bush and Tony Blair, the political leaders of the liberating coalition. The contrast could hardly have been greater.
On the one hand, the exuberance of a people finally being released from 35 years of tyranny and oppression and, on the other, a somewhat mixed bag of individuals and interest groups coming together to publicly declare that the liberation was "not in their name". The Iraqi people beginning to savour the prospect of democracy while some here, presumably democrats all, voicing their opposition. Ah, the luxury of freedom of expression!
The Not In Our Name coalition didn't offer any realistic alternative to the action taken by the allies. It seemed enough merely to claim that military action was wrong - irrespective of the consequences for the Iraqis of Saddam and his regime remaining in power. The protesters, and many others, simply refuse to accept the harsh reality that not all conflicts can be resolved by negotiation and diplomacy. That governments sometimes have to resort to force to bring about peace and stability.
This attitude, at least here in Northern Ireland, is I believe, to a large degree born of a certain arrogance shared by many more than the protesters at Hillsborough. That arrogance says, "We have solved all our problems by dialogue and discussion so why can't everyone else do the same?" It's as though we see ourselves as being expert practitioners of the art of conflict resolution. In some minds, we have now overtaken even South Africa in the imaginary league table of successful conflict resolution stories. This conceit is at least premature, potentially dangerous and based on wishful thinking and self-deception.
Despite their public comments, I hope that Bush and Blair don't share it.
When they suggested to the assembled media at Hillsborough Castle that the Northern Ireland peace process could be a potential model or template for other conflicts, particularly in Iraq and the Middle East, a stranger would have been forgiven for believing that everything here has finally been sorted. That all in the garden is rosy, so to speak, when the reality is that things are very far from that.
It's not only in such places as Saddam's Iraq that people can be too terrified to publicly express an opinion, the same is still true within many communities across Northern Ireland. A society more divided than ever along sectarian lines and fraught with sporadic outbreaks of inter- and intra-community violence can hardly be lauded as a success story.
A list of bullet-point dos and don'ts taken from our experiment in conflict transformation would surely see the don'ts far outnumber the dos. We should accept and publicly acknowledge that fact instead of fooling ourselves and seeking to fool others. If anything positive is to be garnered from our process by people in other regions of conflict it can only be by openly and honestly pointing up the many mistakes we have made and the difficulties that still remain.
Full implementation of the Good Friday agreement is still stymied by the differing interpretations being put on aspects of it by some of the participants to the negotiations that brought it about. As the arguments have raged here during the past five years over what is required of whom, and when, the obvious lesson is that a political agreement should - unlike our own - be clear, unambiguous and unequivocal.
Political negotiators and, more critically, the electorate required to endorse a political settlement should have a clear and shared understanding of what it means. No-one should be under any illusions about what they are buying into. There should be clarity on what compromises they are expected to make; the time-frame within which they are expected to make them; and the certain penalties to be incurred for defaulting on obligations.
Continuous negotiations and advantage-seeking around critical aspects of the Good Friday agreement have created a political instability that certainly wasn't in the original script. All of this has resulted in a majority of unionists losing faith in politics in general and with the peace process in particular.
Unionism sees an obsession with process to the exclusion of everything else. If our agreement is to survive, never mind be held up as an example to others, then the governments must insist that the multitude of mini-processes currently running within it are brought to the conclusion that most of us were led to believe they would.
Naive arrogance amongst the Not In Our Name crowd is one thing - amongst political leaders it is quite another.
• David Adams, a freelance journalist, was a member of the Ulster Democratic Party, the former party associated with the UDA.