Belfast on the Euphrates?

Matt Yglesias sees walls going up in Baghdad and wonders if the US Army is using Northern Ireland as its template:

I believe this technique comes to the US Army’s counterinsurgency theorists via Belfast, where I believe they have been effective in helping the British maintain a degree of order.

To some extent, this brings us back to the question of strategy. If tactics employed in Northern Ireland can be made to work in Iraq (and maybe they can) even though Iraq has ten times as many people as Northern Ireland does and even though Iraqis don’t speak English and even though the sectarian violence in Iraq is undergirded by concrete fighting over valuable resources, then does this really seem like a wise strategic undertaking? It doesn’t seem that way to me. It’s been decades since “the Troubles,” after all, and while Northern Ireland is now in a situation that there’s reason to be optimistic about, you could imagine it all going to shit.