Is this history as tragedy or farce?

It being an especially quiet day on the web, we made the mistake of surfing over to the odious Instapundit to see him plug "Michelle Malkin's audacious new book" In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror. This is a book that the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy will able to promote in its sleep, because the tactics are so tried and tested at this point -- the politically loaded and self-consciously contrarian title, a huge media machine to cover the supposed PC squelching of the book, and the sidestepping of the fact that given the cause and the author, any arguments in the book to advance its thesis will be total shite.

But hey, the author is a woman espousing reactionary causes, which is so, like, transgressive, so clear some spots on the Bill O'Reilly show immediately. The "liberal" media will then feel compelled to allocate some column inches to a "balanced" report on the outrage, and God forbid, some of what the book advocates could actually become government policy.

Our own point of curiosity about this book is to see what the coterie of Irish-American yellers will make of it -- the aforementioned O'Reilly of course, but also Sean Hannity, and even America's Pundit, Tim Russert. Not for the first time, the US War on Terror seems to be taking unwise tips from Northern Ireland, which, if it was getting more attention, might not be what Dubya would want those coveted Irish-American voters to hear about.

Will Michelle's defence of internment cover its disastrous application in Northern Ireland? Even 30-plus years later, we still don't know all the details about its introduction by the British government in 1971, but with each release of the British Cabinet papers (following the thirty year lag) a little more comes out. Such as:

[BBC] The UK Government introduced internment in Northern Ireland in 1971 against the advice of its military commander, newly-released secret documents show.

The decision to detain republican terrorist suspects without trial caused fury and unrest in Catholic communities.

But Lieutenant General Sir Harry Tuzo, head of the Army in the province, had warned it would have a "harmful effect", according to the confidential cabinet papers.

Documents released under the 30-year rule also make it clear that the move, regarded as one of the biggest mistakes of the troubles, was made against the counsel of Whitehall advisers. [PM] Heath himself acknowledged that the measure was an explicitly "political act" intended to shore up the government of Northern Ireland's Ulster Unionist Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, in the face of the rising tide of IRA violence.

So, there's the prior experience with internment of the other main player in the war in Iraq: it didn't work, the military and senior civilian officials were against it from the start, and the Prime Minister who actually made the decision did so to prop up a collapsing government, not because he expected it to be militarily effective. Is anyone taking odds on how long the new Iraqi government is expected to last?

[UPDATE: after this posting, it occurred to us that we are not even fully tuned in to Malkin's insansity; she is advocating internment of US citizens, not in Iraq, thus identical to internment in Northern Ireland, but without the attempt to prop up a teetering sub-national (or foreign?) government. The blog Orcinus does the necessary work in bringing actual historical facts about the US experience with internment to the table.]