TruthNews Commentary, June 29, 2002

We decided to survey the writings of a few of our favorite columnists to see what they had to say about President Bush's new peace plan to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The speech called for Yasser Arafat's removal as Palestinian leader, democratic reforms within the Palestinian authority, and tolerance and liberty for Palestinian society. Bush promised that "when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East."

Most of the commentators we surveyed viewed the speech positively, although several questioned whether the plan could actually be implemented.

Michael Kelly, writing in the Washington Post, held hope that the Palestinians would vote Arafat out of office and elect new leaders that "at least credibly promise a representative government of laws, who at least credibly promise to reject terror and murder and war as the means toward statehood, who at least credibly are committed to achieving a workable two-state, side-by-side peace with Israel."

Bush has set the Palestinian issue within the context of a larger approach that is fundamentally, historically radical: a rejection of decades of policy, indeed a rejection of the entire philosophy of Middle East diplomacy.

This philosophy has rested on a willingness to accept a U.S. role as a player in a running fraud. In the interests of "stability" and cheap oil and concessions to American military needs, the United States chose to recognize all regimes (except those such as Iran, Libya and Iraq who openly attacked us or the regional status quo) as more or less legitimate. Successive American administrations looked the other way as regimes established gangster states, police states, fascist theocracies; as they erected democracies that were dictatorships; as they looted and tortured and killed vast numbers of their own; as they provided crucial territorial, financial and logistical support to terrorists who murdered Americans. We pretended that these regimes were honorable and that we could do honorable business with them.

The Oslo peace process, which ended in a self-made disaster, was the perfect fruit of this tree. The administrations of Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin knew of course that Arafat was wholly duplicitous, wholly incompetent and a delusional murderous schemer. They knew his people knew this. They knew he was lying when he pretended to want a workable peace. They knew his people knew this too. Yet they treated him as an honest man upon whom could be built a decent peace and a decent state.

Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post praised the fact that for the first time, a U.S. president was pushing democracy in the Middle East:

President Bush went far beyond the obvious. He dared to apply the fundamental principle of American foreign policy -- the promotion of democracy -- to the one area where it has always been considered verboten: the Middle East.

There is never any guarantee of peace, but democracy comes close. There is no reason in principle why an open and democratic Palestine could not resolve what is essentially a border dispute with an open and democratic Israel.

The president's proposal for democratizing Palestine is a fundamental rejection of the Oslo conceit that you could impose upon Palestinian society a PLO thugocracy led by the inventors of modern terrorism and then be surprised that seven years later it exploded in violence.

The Bush proposal is grounded in the larger American idea that the spread of democracy is fundamental not only to the spread of American values but also to the achievement of peace.

Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online echoed Krauthammer's sentiments:

Everywhere else in the world, the United States has a single, consistent, and, most of all, an honest message: We value democracy, the rule of law, free markets, free speech, free religion, freedom. Only in the Arab world do we get tongue-tied in fealty to the lies we've been telling since, at least, FDR got wined and dined by Saudi rulers. That is, until the day before yesterday when President Bush said, in effect, "enough with the lies." He spoke honestly about the fact that America can tell the difference between arsonists and firefighters, between right and wrong, between truth and lies.

William F. Buckley of the National Review was more pessimistic, believing the President's policy would ultimately lead to more terrorism:

We occupied Japan and Germany not for three years, but for 10, generating and refurbishing democratic institutions. And we had overlords in place, superintending the process, men of the character of Douglas McArthur and John McCloy. Do we propose to send someone to Ramallah to take the place of Arafat?

Mr. Bush managed to say to the Palestinians on Monday that the thing they most specifically desire, which is statehood, they will specifically not achieve until there is a cultural revolution in the land.

The perfect response to Buckley's sentiments was provided by James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal. Responding to an article by William Saletan on Slate which complained that Bush was requiring the Palestinians to jump through hoops for statehood, Taranto commented,

What a curious view Saletan has, in which democracy and freedom are "hoops" to "jump through" and the real "prize" is a "state."

Syndicated columnist Paul Greenberg shared Buckley's pessimism about the Bush plan:

So this president has suggested a new, reformed, provisional state of Palestine, which will be billed as something new and daring, but which is only a new term for what has always been missing in the frustrating equation that is the Middle East: a peaceful Palestinian state. Without such a state, the equation is unsolvable. For the war will not end until the terror does.

There is nothing new about this proviso. Arab Palestinians could have had a state any time (in 1937, in 1947, in 1993) if they had been willing to settle for it instead of war. They still can.

But until that faraway day arrives, it is clear that, if the Israelis want even a semblance of security, they will have to reoccupy the West Bank and, soon enough, Gaza.

Now the Israelis realize they have little choice but to occupy those territories indefinitely, and do the job Yasser Arafat had promised to: wipe out the terrorists. The Israelis also realize the danger and soul-corruption that occupation breeds. That's why they've hesitated to move for so long, adopting only halfway, then three-quarters-way measures to assure their security. Now they've come to see that occupation is the worst of all possible alternatives -- except all the others.

Cal Thomas thought that the Bush speech "was about as protective of Israel's interests as one could expect from a divided administration," but he also

The onus is clearly on the Palestinians to demonstrate whether they truly want a peacefully co-existing state with democratic values and will commit to ending terror. Good luck. With the exception of Israel, no other nation in the Middle East has a history of democracy or is about to accept a Western model of government.

They won't, of course, because the intention of much of the Palestinian leadership and its followers is not building shopping malls and prosperity, separation of powers, a constitution, freedom and peaceful co-existence with Israel. Their theology, as expounded by radical clerics, is that Israel has stolen land that is theirs (all of it) and that their God is ticked and wants them to use force to reclaim the land, which includes the murder of babies and grandmothers.

Bush's proposals condition any hope of a Palestinian state on changed behavior, changed thinking and a complete change in leadership. The Middle East is known for miracles, but this one is beyond belief.

George Will of the Washington Post viewed the speech in the larger context of the war on terrorism. He did not hold out great hope that the policy would bring about peace in the Middle East, but he thought that if would remove the distraction caused by the Palestinian uprising and let the administration get on with the larger war on terror.

President Bush's Monday statement was the most clearsighted U.S. intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis in the 35 years since the 1967 war, and perhaps in the 54 years since the founding of Israel. It enunciated a policy that makes eventual peace at least conceivable, and meanwhile frees the president to pursue the global anti-terrorism agenda articulated in five other speeches in the past year.

For many months the Middle East crisis -- more precisely, the war against Israel's homeland security -- has threatened to paralyze U.S. action on this larger imperative. Paralysis is the aim of terrorists for whom chaos is a strategy.

On Monday the president effectively circumscribed the Israeli-Palestinian distraction. The path he has charted to peace through Palestinian regeneration is a long one. Meanwhile, for the president there is, elsewhere, "the path of action."

Our own view, as we expressed in our previous columns this week, is that the Bush speech will, if not spark reform in the Palestinian authority, at least give the Israelis cover for expelling Arafat, occupying the territories, and destroying the terrorist infrastructure. Whether Israel's "national unity" government can summon the political will to carry out such a strategy is questionable. In the meantime, our own State Department will be watering down the Bush strategy with statements explaining "what the President meant to say."

The window won't be open very long. Israel needs to act now before it's back to business as usual.