Have you ever noticed that sometimes the Catholic/Protestant thing here in Northern Ireland means a lot more than just the Shankill and the Falls?
There has been, admittedly not often, a Catholic interpretation and a Protestant interpretation of what happens abroad.
The Ulster Protestant League, which was Paisleyism of the 1930s, once asked why the British Empire should be expected to go to the help of 'Fenian Belgium'.
Paisley used to denounce the European Community as another popish plot, but that was before he became an MEP.
And even when he became an MEP he once disgraced himself, forgetting he was in Strasbourg and not on the Shankill Road, when the Pope addressed the European Parliament.
Today, if you listen carefully to what some of the politicians are saying, you will see that the philosophy of the Falls and the Shankill are again having an impact internationally.
David Trimble is convinced that Bush and Blair are quite right.
Saddam Hussein is a wicked man. He tortures people. He has canisters full of deadly chemicals and poison gas. He breeds anthrax germs and smallpox. He might even have an atomic bomb.
Of course the British have never tortured anybody. All that stuff about romper rooms and hooded men in Girdwood Barracks back in the early 1970s was just a lot of IRA propaganda that misled the European Court of Human Rights into finding the British guilty.
No soldier or policeman ever fired canisters of CS gas at people demonstrating for civil rights in Derry.
Did the Americans not refrain in all good conscience from using fire-bombs and deadly chemicals in Vietnam?
And when it comes to dealing with wicked rulers who torture and murder their political opponents the British and the Americans know how to choose.
It is not long since the British sent August Pinochet safely back home when Spain was demanding that he be tried for his crimes against the people of Chile.
Iraq has also, as it happens, the world's second largest oil fields.
But maybe that is something Mr Trimble has not yet noticed. Perhaps it has not yet occurred to him that Bush and Blair might want Iraq's oil more than they want Saddam's poison gas, chemicals and bottled epidemics.
Even so Saddam Hussien had better be careful.
It is bad enough having enemies like Bush and Blair and Donald Rumsfeld. But to have David Trimble as an enemy must indeed be a big worry in Baghdad.
Saddam might be consoled, however, when he sees that if Trimble is hostile, the same cannot be said of Gerry Adams.
Adams has denounced the British invasion of Iraq. But is he not being ungrateful considering that he and his party have been treated very generously by Prime Minister Blair, far better, David Trimble would say, than loyal Ulster Unionists?
How can Gerry expect to remain on good terms with George Bush if he continues to oppose the invasion of Iraq?
Surely America is another good friend, the best, next to Tony Blair, Irish Republicans have ever had, especially on St Patrick's Day.
Gerry Adams might therefore be well-advised to mind his words when he talks about the war in Iraq, or at least not repeat his objections too often.
What he says might be noticed at the White House or, worse still, taken up by Dr Richard Haass, George Bush's special envoy to the six counties. And Haass has the reputation of being a hard man to deal with.
You might not be surprised to learn that projecting the sectarian prejudices of this part of the world into international affairs is historically nothing new.
In one of his essays, published in Eire-Ireland many years ago, Donall O Luanaigh revealed that at the time of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Irish nationalists demonstrated in support of the French while the unionists, especially unionists in the north, demonstrated with perhaps greater zeal in support of the Germans.
The newspapers were divided in the same way. One small Unionist paper denounced a pro-French public meeting in Dublin as "essentially a Fenian demonstration".
In Derry sectarian rioters taunted one another with slogans such as "Up France!", "Up Prussia!", " To Hell with the Pope!", "Damn King Billy!"
In September 1870 when the French were finally defeated, 12,000 Protestants gathered in Lurgan to celebrate and only the Party Processions Act, it seems, "prevented the Protestants of Belfast from demonstrating their joy".
But who will rejoice most, Trimble or Gerry Adams, when, if ever, the war in Iraq is over?
