THE PARADIGM DONE GONE :

The Bush Doctrine, R.I.P. (Frank Rich, 4/13/02, NY Times)

As a statement of principle set forth by an American chief executive, the now defunct Bush Doctrine may have had a shelf life even shorter than Kenny Boy's Enron code of ethics. As a statement of presidential intent, it may land in the history books alongside such magisterial moments as Lyndon Johnson's 1964 pledge not to send American boys to Vietnam and Richard Nixon's 1968 promise to "bring us together."

It was in September that the president told Congress that "from this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." It was in November that he told the United Nations that "there is no such thing as a good terrorist." Now the president is being assailed even within his own political camp for not only refusing to label Yasir Arafat a terrorist but judging him good enough to be a potential partner in our desperate effort to tamp down the flames of the Middle East.

Humans seem to find life easiest to understand when approached metaphorically. For instance, the story of Man's Fall provides our understanding of human nature and Darwinism provides our understanding of evolution, even though both are more literary metaphors than scientific reality. So, in the Middle East, it has been helpful for the Left to understand the actions of the Palestinians these last thirty-five years as a struggle for independence and for the Right to understand them as terrorist acts. But the stubborn persistence of these metaphorical understandings in now doing us all a disservice.

The Palestinian people have had a state in all but name for several years now. They won that struggle. Yasir Arafat is no longer just the head of some terrorist cell, like the head of the Red Brigades or the Symbionese Liberation Army, he's the ruler of the Palestinian people, responsible for the actions of the state he controls and for the policy they pursue. Subsequent attacks on Israel have been acts of war. They need to be treated as such.

It is obviously in Israel's best interest, and in ours, for them to find some way to coexist (relatively) peacefully with their Arab neighbors. To that end both Israel and the US have cut Yasar Arafat a tremendous amount of slack, in the hope that he would settle for nationhood. This has required Israel to react more cautiously than it probably should have to attacks by Palestinian bombers. And it requires us to treat Arafat like any other head of a state with which we're trying to do business. But it finally seems like we stand on the brink of that moment where we will be forced to come to terms with the refusal of the Palestinians to accept mere statehood and realize that what they truly want, as their charter has so long stated, is to destroy Israel.

Arafat is not called a terrorist by the White House because he ceased to be a terrorist when he took control of Palestine. Since then he's been just like every other tin-pot dictator throughout history who holds power through violence against his own people and distracts them from their plight by whipping up war against a neighbor. Like the rest of those tyrannts, he requires a perpetual state of war or else his people will discard him and choose a government capable of providing the decent life we all expect in peacetime. Arafat's choice now, as it has been for several years, is between surrendering power for the good of his people or maintaining personal power regardless of the consequences to his people. Does anyone seriously doubt which he'll choose?

The Israeli-Palestinian war (soon to be known as the Three Days War) when it comes will shock folks like Frank Rich, who still delude themselves that this is a matter of patriotic freedom fighters using excessive means to win their struggle against an evil occupying force, and who will look around and try to figure out how come there are instead suddenly two sovereign peoples fighting an entirely traditional war. But there will be nothing sudden about it--the metaphors changed several years ago, it's just taking the NY Times and many others an absurdly long time to catch up.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2002 10:19 AM