Bill Clinton: “Yes, except I would use a different word. I think you can say that in many ways it is the first true conflict…”

“Yes, except I would use a different word. I think you can say that in many ways it is the first true conflict resolution. But instead of saying neither side won, I would say both sides won. And I think that if they didn't think they were winning, they would not have done this. And I think when you look at the fact that the biggest problem in the world today are these conflicts over racial, ethnic, and religious differences sweeping the world, the fact that you have set a model here for reconciliation in what has often been a violent and always been a deeply historically embedded struggle, is a profound significance, because this element of people fearing and distrusting and then hating and dehumanizing those who are different from them is at the heart of the problem in the Middle East, the problems in the Balkans, the tribal wars in Africa. You just see it all over the world. And so I think the people of Northern Ireland and their friends in the Irish Republic--who voted for the necessary changes to implement the Good Friday accord--and in Great Britain, they should know that what they have done is given enormous support and heart to people who are still struggling in very difficult circumstances everywhere in the world. It's just--I can't tell you how important I think it is. You should have seen the look on the people's faces in Kosovo, the party leaders who are still so fresh from their struggles, when I just was, in effect, hammering them with the decisions that the people and the leaders in Northern Ireland had made and the kind of accommodation that they had made to one another and how, sooner or later, people who shared the same piece of land had to work through not necessarily identical decisions but the same sorts of decisions in the same sort of way. So it is a matter of truly historic proportions, not because nobody won, but because everybody won. End of Ireland's Claim on Ulster Mr. Little. Sir, today the Irish Republic did give up a very tangible expression of its identity, as it says, its right to have control over those six counties in Northern Ireland. Some Republicans will say they've given up a birthright today. What do you say to them?”