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 t's
been a bad year for the Clinton legacy, in case you haven't noticed.
Not so long ago our Man From Hope was driving hard toward his first
Nobel Peace Prize, despite deploying more American soldiers overseas
than any president since the end of the Second World War. His Nobel
application rested on two widely hailed accomplishments: notably
advancing peace in the Middle East, and bringing peace to Northern
Ireland. The evidence for Middle East peace was a handshake, in
Washington, between Rabin and Arafat. The evidence for Irish peace
was that George Mitchell said so. Everyone was so impressed that
Mitchell was later dispatched to the Middle East to work his magic
there.
At the time,
some of us rudely pointed out that it was all a hoax, because peace
doesn't happen that way. Peace cannot be accomplished simply because
some visiting envoy, with or without an advanced degree in negotiating
from the Harvard Business School, sits everyone down around a table
so they can all reason together. In every case I can think of, peace
has come about at the end of a war in which there was a winner and
a loser. The winner imposed terms on the loser, and those terms
were called "peace." In each case of Clinton's Glorious
Peace Legacy, one side (our "allies") was willing to compromise
and the other (the "terrorists") wasn't, and insisted
on winning. And in each case it was perfectly obvious at the time.
The IRA's leaders assured the faithful that they weren't going to
disarm, and Arafat and his cronies told their faithful that they
weren't going to abandon their core policy of destroying Israel
and killing all the Jews.
Only someone
intent on deception — like Clinton — or a total dufus — like, say,
Tom Friedman — could have believed that peace was at hand, and theirs
was not a merely intellectual error. Belief in the phony peace process
made things worse, produced more killing than the previously acknowledged
conflict had, and made war more likely. Moreover, the phony peace
gave the terrorists time to refine their tactics and improve their
weapons, and undermined both the discipline and morale of the would-be
peacemakers on the other side. Worse still, all the misleading peace
talk has made it harder to talk seriously about war, which is a
very serious matter.
Israel must
now wage war against the Palestinians, and Great Britain will now
have to resume its long battle against the IRA, and both democracies
are groping for winning strategies. Sharon and Blair can both expect
intense criticism, because only the butchers of Damascus, the long-celebrated
Assad family, can get away with massive ethnic cleansing of Lebanese
Christians without hearing a word of criticism from the learned
moralists of the United Nations and the self-appointed guardians
of human rights. If Sharon gets blasted by Secretary Powell (who
has succumbed to the usual regimen of dumb pills apparently required
of all permanent employees of the Department of State) for merely
enforcing the Oslo Agreements and evicting the PLO from its squatter
quarters in Jerusalem, we can expect a great clicking and clucking
of foreign service tongues when British special forces take their
first action against the IRA.
The real world
can be terribly unforgiving, and even the most carefully crafted
illusion of a legacy can be blown away by killers on the ground.
W. should keep this in mind as he contemplates his big trip to China
this fall. Just as Arafat and Adams pulled off their peace scams
while preparing to escalate the armed conflict, so the Chinese leaders
will strive mightily to charm and entrance the president. Jiang
Zemin wants us to believe that China has no intention of expanding
its territory in any direction, least of all through war against
Taiwan, even as his military commanders ceaselessly prepare to invade.
W. will do well to note the humiliation of his predecessor, and
to commit to memory the wise words of the ancients: If you desire
peace, prepare for war.
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