For whatever it's worth, Bill Maher us wrong about the Irish- they never surrendered, and the entire Northern Irish peace process has been predicated on making sure that no faction was humiliated, no one was forced to play the role of the vanquished faction. If the British had been kept on insisting that the republican side "surrender", The Troubles would never have ended.

The lesson of Northern Ireland is that humiliation doesn't work, that "victory" in the military sense is a thing of the past and the only way to end the world's conflicts is to work for face-saving compromises in which no faction is humiliated and none is assumed to be irredeemable evil.