Posted on 09/23/2002 6:47:01 AM PDT by BenF
Today's "Friday" section leads with what should become a historic document: a roundup of well-known figures attempting to name the current war with the Palestinians at its two-year mark. Here is my own offering - the Unrecognized War.
This obviously didactic name takes a cue from what Winston Churchill wanted to call World War II: the Unnecessary War. Churchill's point was that the allies could have easily prevented the war if they had stood up to Hitler while he was rearming, in violation of the Versailles Treaty, instead of sympathizing with German "grievances."
The current war was also unnecessary in an eerily similar manner, in that Palestinian violations of the Oslo Accords were ignored in the same way - and anyone who objected was subjected to the same accusation of being "against peace." But the salient characteristic of this war is not that it could have been prevented, but our ambivalence over calling it a war in the first place.
For the first few months of what we are now calling a war, we may recall, the waning Barak and Clinton administrations were still busy sweetening the package offered to the Palestinians at the Camp David summit the previous summer. Even when Ariel Sharon was swept in by a landslide, largely because of public rejection of these months of "negotiating under fire," Yasser Arafat continued to be treated by Israel and the US as more of a lapsed partner than a military rival.
As late as September 2001 the issue here was whether Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would allow Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to meet with Yasser Arafat - a potential diplomatic process that had the support of Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer and the US.
Even after September 11, Arafat was far from out of the picture. It was less than six months ago, in April, when Secretary of State Colin Powell was dispatched to meet with Arafat, presumably because he was still recognized not only as part of the problem, but as part of the solution.
None of this behavior much resembled what we normally call war. In a war opposing forces normally try to deprive the other side of the ability or will to fight back. It has been widely noted that the Palestinians wage war differently, since they mostly skip around Israeli forces and instead target Israeli civilians.
But Israel too has not fought normally, because it has remained well shy of toppling the central authority to which it attributes full responsibility for the war. No one doubts that Israel has the power to take over whatever territory it wishes and evict Arafat from the area. One can argue the merits of Israel's tactical decision not to do to the PA what the US did to the Taliban, but it was a decision, not a function of the limits of Israeli power. It was a decision, further, that raises the question of whether, even now, Israel is acting as if it is fighting a war.
Though considerably less so, similar questions can be raised about the American "war against terrorism." While the US was not found talking to the Taliban or Saddam Hussein the way Israel was talking to the regime it holds responsible for waging war, there is similar fuzziness both in defining the enemy and in the less than all-out means used to defeat it.
To this, a defender of the Bush Administration might say that a step-by-step approach should not be mistaken for a lack of determination or clear thinking. When Saudi princes are hosted at Bush's ranch it may not look like the US is at war, but there is a method to its meandering. In a war, one may choose to fight on different fronts sequentially, rather than all at once.
Yet, while I find this line of defense largely convincing, there is a pattern here of democracies having trouble matching the rhetoric of war with its full implications when attacked by an enemy that hides behind terrorist proxies. The Palestinian Authority hides (barely) behind Hamas and Islamic Jihad; Iran, Iraq, and Syria hide behind Hizbullah, al-Qaida, and numerous other terrorist groups.
And yet, by this simple, transparent tactic these regimes remained almost completely immune before September 11 and are still not - except for Saddam, so far - bearing the full brunt of enemy status as would happen in a real war. This is illustrated by how controversial it was when Bush dared label three such nations an "axis of evil" in January.
With that speech, and his historic laying down the gauntlet last week in the United Nations, it seems clear that Bush himself understands that we are at war. What is amazing, however, is how hard he must work at convincing the rest of the free world that this is the case.
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(c) 2002 The Jerusalem Post
Indeed. It seems that the Democrats and other liberals (especially the liberal media) are doing everything they can to go against Bush. No surprise there. Are they making common cause with our enemies or is it simply a ploy to divert people's attention away from a very real threat in the hopes of garnering more votes in November?
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