A Star Called Henry is Roddy Doyle’s novel about a street urchin become IRA operative in the early days of the Revolution.
Before I went back to bed that night I’d been sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood…I was special, one of the few. And before the end of the week, by late Saturday afternoon, I’d murdered my first rozzer…That was the plan: one dead man…Nothing too murderous; that was the order. The whack of a piece of wood [he hit him with his father's old wooden leg], almost an accident.
And the British would hit back; they’d over-react. They always did. Over the next four years, they never let us down. It wasn’t that they made bad judgements, got the mood of the country wrong: they never judged at all. They never considered the mood of the country worth judging. They made rebels of thousands of quiet people who’d never thought beyond their garden gates. They were always our greatest ally; we never could have done it without them. [p.188f]
And so have we: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Iran. We never considered them anything but the other, not worth considering, and the hatred goes on and multiplies.