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Ulster is becoming Britain’s Vietnam. Indeed, it is fair to say that Britain stands toward peace in Northern Ireland today where America stood in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s. The parallel is uncanny. When President Kennedy died, only 120 American soldiers had been killed in action in Vietnam between 1961 and 1963. This week we learned that 128 persons had died in Northern Ireland in the two years of bitter violence that has gripped that land since British troops first arrived in 1969. We know that the years from 1961 to 1963 were only an early chapter in the American horror of Vietnam. We know the tragedy that unfolded there in later years: 45,000 Americans have now died in the war; hundreds of thousands of North and South Vietnamese soldiers have been killed; millions of innocent civilians have died and millions more are homeless refugees in their own country. (en) |
