 efore
his election in November 1992, Bill Clinton spoke of the Middle East
peace process as if it were a cooing infant: “I think that we have
to give this peace process a chance to work. We have to nourish it;
we have to support it; we have to maintain its continuity.”
Even after
eight years of failed diplomacy, including Barak-Arafat negotiations
that led directly to more violence, the peace process still held
Clinton’s affection: “The violence does not demonstrate that the
quest for peace has gone too far — but that it has not gone
far enough. And points not to the failure of negotiations —
but to the futility of violence and force.”
Eight months,
more dead bodies, and a new administration later, Washington--at
least until Tuesday — still hadn’t entirely given up on the
peace process.
For such a
fragile thing, needing constant nurturing and support, the peace
process seems pretty durable: It, or the notion of it, survives
most any act of violence, hatred, and war. As British political
thinker Michael Howard writes, “Throughout human history mankind
has been divided between those who believe that peace must be preserved,
and those who believe that it must be attained.”
In the current
Middle East crisis, that first school of thought is so stubborn
that it insists on trying to “preserve” a peace that doesn’t exist,
a peace that is a fantasy overlaid on the bloody facts on the ground,
the mortar attacks, the ambushes, the suicide bombers.
“War appears
to be as old as mankind,” wrote Sir Henry Maine in the 19th century,
“but peace is a modern invention.” Our way of thinking of peace
today is an Enlightenment one: It is a peace, as Howard puts it,
“resulting not from some millennial divine intervention that would
persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb, but from the forethought
of rational human beings who had taken matters into their own hands.”
Peace, in
other words, as the end-result of a rational process. This
is the idea of peace that was originally formulated by 19th-century
thinkers like Kant and Bentham, that animated Woodrow Wilson and,
after him, all the hopeful appeasers between the two World Wars,
and that eventually passed through Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton,
in particularly righteous and unctuous forms, respectively.
It is one
of contemporary liberalism’s most stubborn, characteristic, and
dangerous ideas. It has seeped into the way we think about all international
conflicts, and seems to influence every administration, regardless
of party. It’s an idea that depends on a combination of legalism,
illusory rationalism, and sentimentality.
This faulty
idea of peace often provides an opening for terrorists and tyrants
to exploit the naïve intentions of their civilized adversaries,
working their will by force and eventually creating the conditions
for a war on terms much less favorable to those who had no taste
for it in the first place. When it comes to the Middle East, it
is the idea to which Israeli civilians routinely — and now
American civilians, massively — have been sacrificed.
The World
Trade Center and Pentagon attacks should serve to strip away the
assumptions of peace-process liberalism, at least for now, at least
until this persistent illusion has time to reassert itself. In the
meantime, world opinion should give Israel broad latitude if it
decides to wage full war on its tormentors. It won’t be the war
that is immoral, but the conduct that prompted it; it won’t be its
winners who are blameworthy, but its losers.
As for the
U.S. response to the September 11 attackers, it should be fierce
and unrelenting, serving the cause that animates virtually all just
wars: establishing the peace in a way that half-measures and wishful
negotiations never can.
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