Peace in the North was bought in hard cash: they addressed most of the underlying inequities and pumped in crap loads of money to raise standards of living for the people that would have been inclined to support the terrorists. Peace came when the terrorists needed to save face because their power base was eroding.
Are you really proposing that people in the North felt sorry for the Brits? Or did you mean people outside the North?
It's much harder to hate people who lose lots of soldiers without getting to kill a lot of people back, versus one who kills hordes of terrorists (and civilians) while losing no soldiers of his own.
COIN is often not about cumulative losses or costs, but about patience. And the people who have the most patience are the locals. The Brits had that patience because they had plenty of locals on their side. The losses and costs were never threatening from any real perspective: the Brits lost 50 times as many people during just the first day of the battle of Somme in 1916. Patience conquers. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
1969 Northern Ireland riots - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The rioting petered out by Sunday, 17 August. Eight people had been killed and 750 injured, of whom 133 (72 Catholics and 61 Protestants) were treated for gunshot wounds. In addition a total of 1,505 Catholic families and 315 Protestant ones were expelled from their homes, either through burning or intimidation. A further 275 commercial premises were badly damaged or destroyed, of which 83% were Catholic. The riots represented the most sustained violence that Northern Ireland had seen since the early 1920s. Protestants and unionists believed the violence showed the true face of the Civil Rights movement - as a front for the IRA and armed insurrection. Catholics, on the other hand, saw the riots, particularly in Belfast, as an assault on their community, in which the forces of the state had appeared as anything but neutral. The disturbances, taken together with the Battle of the Bogside, are often cited as the beginning of the Troubles. Violence escalated sharply in Northern Ireland after these events, with the formation of new paramilitary groups on either side, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army in December of that year. On the loyalist side, the Ulster Volunteer Force (formed in 1966) were galvanised by the August riots and in 1971, another paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association was founded out of a coalition of loyalist militants who had been active since August 1969. The largest of these was the Shankill Defence Association, led by John McKeague, which had been responsible for what organisation there was of loyalist violence in the riots of August 1969. In addition, thousands of British Army troops were deployed into Northern Ireland. While the troops were initially seen as a neutral force, they rapidly got dragged into the street violence and by 1971 were devoting most of their attention to combatting republican paramilitaries.
The rioting petered out by Sunday, 17 August. Eight people had been killed and 750 injured, of whom 133 (72 Catholics and 61 Protestants) were treated for gunshot wounds. In addition a total of 1,505 Catholic families and 315 Protestant ones were expelled from their homes, either through burning or intimidation. A further 275 commercial premises were badly damaged or destroyed, of which 83% were Catholic.
The riots represented the most sustained violence that Northern Ireland had seen since the early 1920s. Protestants and unionists believed the violence showed the true face of the Civil Rights movement - as a front for the IRA and armed insurrection. Catholics, on the other hand, saw the riots, particularly in Belfast, as an assault on their community, in which the forces of the state had appeared as anything but neutral. The disturbances, taken together with the Battle of the Bogside, are often cited as the beginning of the Troubles. Violence escalated sharply in Northern Ireland after these events, with the formation of new paramilitary groups on either side, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army in December of that year. On the loyalist side, the Ulster Volunteer Force (formed in 1966) were galvanised by the August riots and in 1971, another paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association was founded out of a coalition of loyalist militants who had been active since August 1969. The largest of these was the Shankill Defence Association, led by John McKeague, which had been responsible for what organisation there was of loyalist violence in the riots of August 1969. In addition, thousands of British Army troops were deployed into Northern Ireland. While the troops were initially seen as a neutral force, they rapidly got dragged into the street violence and by 1971 were devoting most of their attention to combatting republican paramilitaries.
Provisional IRA got power-sharing in Northern Ireland, release of their prisoners and reform of the police. Arguably they could have negotiated that much earlier, but then again if the brittish goal was simply to keep northern Ireland, they could have avoided the whole trouble by instituting the same reforms much earlier. If it had be done much much earlier in the whole of Ireland, maybe Ireland would today be part of Great Britain.
But then again, then the brittish upper class would not have had the opportunity to plunder Ireland. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
