Special Section: At War - Peace, False and True: The necessity of war

National Review, Oct 1, 2001 by Richard Lowry

Before 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 the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks- 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 self-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 naive 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.

It was Kant who first came up with the notion of a "league of nations" that would provide for collective security and nudge war toward obsolescence. Ever since, earnest peacemakers have sought to achieve the perfect international covenant, one that would define war out of existence. Wilson was the most ambitious. As Donald Kagan points out in his masterpiece, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, Wilson shared the assumptions of the British appeasers between the two world wars. There was no need to keep a boot on the neck of Germany, because everything could be hammered out with international agreements or bodies, foremost among them the League of Nations.

This legalism makes it necessary to view nations and their leaders as rational and reasonable actors. International agreements aren't possible or effective unless all parties are amenable, first to persuasion, and then to the restraints of various parchment boundaries. It is difficult for people with this worldview to take account of the atavistic and savage impulses of peoples and their leaders. This is why most enthusiasts of the Middle East peace process can never admit that the balance of Palestinian opinion favors pushing Israel into the sea, or that it might cheer the murder of thousands of innocent Americans.

Despite its rationalist assumptions, peace-process liberalism usually also depends on a fair amount of hokum, of sentiment and delusion. After Israel and Jordan signed a peace agreement in 1994, Clinton said, "Peace is more than an agreement on paper; it is feeling, it is activity, it is devotion." Because it depends on leaders talking things out, a peace process creates the illusion that important disputes can be boiled down to matters of personality. The New York Times reported in July 2000, "The success of the summit meeting could well depend . . . on whether the president's personal chemistry can help overcome obstacles of history and the calculus of political survival embedded in these high-stake negotiations." All of this woolly thinking and hopefulness was captured in the phrase "the spirit of Oslo," implying that peace was just a pep rally away.