Stalemate in Northern Ireland

“Their orders are to dominate us, y’know,” a Crossmaglen man said softly as we watched a British army patrol edge nervously down a street of this tiny Catholic border town in Northern Ireland. “They’ll never dominate us.”

Crossmaglen nestles in the scenic countryside of South Armagh–two miles from the Irish Republic–in the midst of a notorious area known to British forces as “bandit country” or, more starkly, the “murderers’ triangle.” A sentry tower in the center of the bleak town scans the wilderness (and, incidentally, overlooks a defiant and frequently defaced statue erected to honor those “who have died for Irish freedom”). Behind the to...