Today we all can feel good about Northern Ireland. Protestants and Catholics - Unionists and Republicans in local parlance - are about to jointly run their government.
Belfast, for decades the scene of urban terrorism and the deaths of so many innocents, has become a city of peace and possibility.
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Negotiations are essential. Peace never just happens; it is made, issue by issue, point by point. In order to get negotiations launched, preconditions ought to be kept to an absolute minimum.
In the case of Northern Ireland, it was right to make a cease fire a prerequisite. Killing and talking do not go hand in hand. But it was also right not to require that parties give up their arms or join the police force before the talks began.
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Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, was U.S. envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process. George J. Mitchell, chairman of the law firm of DLA Piper, was the majority leader of the U.S. Senate and led the Northern Ireland negotiations from 1996 to 1998.
