The waiting game

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an article by James Traub which considers IRA decommissioning as a potential precedent for how Hezbollah might be disarmed; indeed this difference in words is an important part of how the process was sold to the more hardline IRA members as not a surrender. Worth a read; here's the key paragraph:

Certainly the I.R.A. precedent shows that even brutal paramilitary groups can ultimately be persuaded to lay down their arms. But it will prove relevant only if Hezbollah has demands that can be satisfied by a political process, so that over time its fighting force will dwindle into “the paramilitary branch” of its political wing, and former soldiers will accept reintegration into civilian life. Hezbollah does, in fact, aspire to gain “adequate representation” for Shiites inside Lebanon, as the I.R.A. did for Catholics in Northern Ireland. But this is scarcely its raison d’être. Hezbollah has used its weapons on Israel, not on the government of Lebanon; and it fights Israel with the professed goal of destroying it. If we take Hezbollah at its word, disarmament can come only in the wake of apocalyptic triumph.

That claim about the IRA is open to dispute; its goal is in fact a united Irish Republic and not just adequate representation for Catholics within NI's political structures -- but it did settle for something far less than unification as part of the Good Friday Agreement. So professed goals can be malleable if conditions are right, which is one positive aspect of the comparison for the Lebanon crisis.