The Irish Republican Militia

It couldn't last forever. Mark Steyn is back writing columns for the Telegraph newspapers, columns written in New Hampshire that need to sound like they are written in Hampshire. Hence, that spell check to catch sceptical, neighbours. And something that has to sound like it would make for witty repartee over a few G&Ts at the club:

I have been trying to persuade my Washington pals to look on Iraq as an exercise in British-style asymmetrical federalism: the Kurdish areas are Scotland, the Shia south is Wales, the Sunni Triangle is Northern Ireland. No need to let the stragglers in one area slow down progress elsewhere.

So there you are folks: hundreds of years of convulsive history of the Atlantic Isles reduced to just another Vast Rightwing Conspiracy spinpoint. There's just too much material to work with here; let's begin by noting that we wrote a post a few weeks ago called Belfast and Fallujah, little knowing that the VRC would soon be stealing our material. But remember what's actually going on in Fallujah and the Shia holy cities -- after thinking about a full-scale shoot-out with the illegal militias, the US military just caves in and negotiates a deal by which the illegal militia becomes a legal militia with the free run of the place.

The IRA and Sinn Fein were always keen to "internationalise" the Northern Ireland conflict, by which they meant bringing in multinational forces to keep the peace, as opposed to the British Army. Well now we know why: a few months of American military involvement in Northern Ireland and the Provos would have been on a path to power much quicker than via some pesky peace process. Does Tony Blair know quite where his love-in with Dubya is leading?