There must be some unionists opposed to the Anglo-American war against Iraq. Hard to believe there's 100 per cent support. No community could be so unthinking or monolithic. Still, if there are any opponents out there they're very quiet. Maybe any anti-war activists are terrorised by local militias and oppressed by local party bosses. A bit like what we're told is going on in Iraq maybe?
There have been a couple of items on local TV and radio asking the same question. Why is it that unionists are, to a man if not a woman, almost totally supportive of Tony Blair's war? Very quickly it became obvious that the issue isn't just support for the war against Iraq, but a whole set of attitudes. As with everything except whether the earth is flat – and even on that you have to reckon with the DUP – the two communities here divide on sectarian lines.
One clue to the reason for the unionist stance emerged when BBCNI justified its gung-ho war coverage by telling people that 'hundreds' of troops from the north are in Iraq and that the 'Royal Irish are playing a crucial role'. You can be pretty sure there wouldn't be too many nationalists among those 'hundreds' of troops killing and bombing Iraqis, but not the 'Iraqi people', you understand. Nor was there ever a headlong stampede of nationalists into the 'Royal Irish' hitherto known as the RIR. Maybe local media managers believe calling them the Royal Irish will somehow sanitise the reputation they acquired here, connected as they will always be to the loathsome UDR.
So, family connections with troops 'at the front' offer one possible explanation for the unionist position. There's more to it than that though. Unequivocal support for the war, more unequivocal even than people in England offer, allows unionists what for them nowadays is a rare opportunity to participate in a British 'shared national experience'. Reviled in the press and electronic media as political dunderheads, dinosaurs who plod in fancy dress through Catholic districts, now for once at least unionists can say, 'Look, we're part of the British experience, we're going through the same trauma as families in Britain. Not like those Irish who almost unanimously oppose the war, and certainly not like those northern nationalists who would instinctively support and sympathise with the Iraqis. Trust us, we support the British army. We're part of it.'
Put another, cruder way, it's an unexpected chance to perform unionists' traditional role as cannon fodder for Britain's imperial delusions. At times in the nineteenth century Irish Catholics made up substantial proportions of the British army, as much as 40 per cent in the 1830s. Before the Famine, half the white troops in India were Irish. But while the Catholic Irish joined the army mainly out of economic necessity, for Protestants, military service was one of the reasons their forebears were in Ireland in the first place; their role was to protect the empire's 'frontier', as Ken Maginness used so revealingly to describe the border.
That now redundant role accounts for unionists' instinctive affinity with various unsavoury regimes around the world: the Israelis, the former Afrikaners, before that again the white Rhodesians, all small implants inserted into a numerically superior population and left beleaguered. Irish nationalists' experience at the hands of unionists in uniform on the other hand explains their instinctive affinity with Palestinians, black south Africans, and now Iraqis.
When a nationalist sees an Iraqi lad being bundled into the back of an armoured personnel carrier with a bag over his head, it conjures up memories of local lads being slung into a Land Rover by British soldiers. When a unionist sees the same image he is much more likely to have been a UDR man who did some bundling or to know someone else who did. He is also quite likely to know one of the 'hundreds of troops' from here who is currently slinging hooded Iraqis into the back of an APC. Unionists therefore equate sympathy for Iraqis with disloyalty.
Nationalists, overwhelmingly opposed to the war, find themselves at one with majority opinion on this island, the rest of Europe, the wider world and with substantial numbers in Britain. They find any idea of loyalty to the activities in Iraq of the British army and, especially, the RIR, bizarre. World-wide demonstrations against the war confirm them in their sense of belonging to a broader coalition of opinion than the isolated British government clings to.
Unionists' support for Blair reinforces them in their isolation on this island but they are consoled that for the first time in yonks they can display extravagant loyalty to a British government, even though – as usual – nobody in Britain cares, least of all Tony Blair.
