NEW WORLD ORDER :

Harder Than McKinley (E. J. Dionne Jr., April 2, 2002, washingtonpost.com)

The war on terror has often been appropriately analogized to the Cold War. But the new war, in fact, represents an even larger assertion of American power -- a quantum leap in American engagement more akin to the one that occurred on McKinley's watch. The Cold War, after all, had a very specific goal: to contain and, if possible, roll back the power of the Soviet Union. In the new struggle, the United States will find itself juggling many objectives at once.

Communism was an evil system built around a flawed idea. Terrorism is evil, too -- the president is right to use the word -- but it is a method, not an idea. That means that "antiterrorism" will always be a less coherent concept than "anticommunism." This explains why the administration is tied up in knots over how to respond to Palestinian terror against Israel. The administration's commitment to opposing terror conflicts with its interest in getting the Palestinians and Israelis to negotiate. The president and his diplomats are wary of taking too hard a line against the Palestinians, because their basic objective is to push the Israeli-Palestinian struggle off to the side. Then they can get on with the business of winning allies for a war against
Iraq.

But this begs the question: If what's happening in Israel isn't "terrorism," what is? Yet, if our goal, correctly, is a two-state solution, how can the United States square its refusal to negotiate with terrorists with its desire to push Israelis and Palestinians toward that end?

Because the balancing act his policy entails is so difficult, Bush has set himself a much harder challenge than McKinley did. That doesn't mean Bush's domestic political position is weaker. On the contrary, Democrats are even more tentative these days than William Jennings Bryan was.

But Bush is going much farther than McKinley ever did. He wants to reorder the world. Our political system is only beginning to absorb the implications of his ambition.

I wonder if this isn't partially wrong--it seems to me that terrorism is an idea, maybe the only one that these folks believe in any more. After all, they've been offered a state, but turned it down. Mightn't they have grown addicted to what started out as a tactic, so that by now, like heroin addicts in search of their next fix, the violence has become the only thing that matters in their lives. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 3, 2002 6:36 PM