WHAT ANOTHER WHITE HOUSE SIGNING CEREMONY SHOULD TELL CONGRESS: BEWARE THE ‘PEACE PROCESSORS’

(Washington, D.C.): Another day, another peace
agreement. It seems just a few days ago that the United
States was brokering a settlement between the warring
factions in Bosnia. Now, the White House is hosting a
signing ceremony on Thursday where the PLO and Israel
will formalize an agreement concerning the West Bank
which was facilitated by the Clinton Administration. At
this rate, Mr. Clinton should have deals concerning all
the world’s nettlesome problems signed by Christmas. The
question is: How many of these will be worth the paper
they are written on by the day he cares most about —
Election Day 1996?

There Can Be No Negotiated Peace With Ruthless
Totalitarians

The character of those with whom peace is supposedly
being made dictates that there will be no genuine,
durable peace arising from these deals. It is, in
particular, a reckless delusion to believe that binding,
valuable agreements can be reached with people like
Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and Palestinian
terrorist Yasser Arafat.

It is especially preposterous to indulge in that
belief when — at the very moment that such individuals
are being lauded for signing up to new agreements — they
are baldly violating existing ones. For example, even as
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was trumpeting his agreement
with Milosevic concerning Bosnia, the Serb dictator was
dispatching arms and paramilitary forces led by a
ruthless thug with the nom de guerre of Arkan to
shore up collapsing Bosnian Serb lines near Banja Luka.
This was merely the latest instance of Milosevic’s
systematic breach of his promise to cut off all support
to Belgrade’s proxies in Bosnia, a promise made in the
hope of inducing the West to end international sanctions
against Serbia.

Then there is Arafat. He and his organizations are
violating virtually every provision of the Declaration of
Principles, the Israeli-PLO agreement signed at the White
House two years ago. Most egregious perhaps has been his
overt condoning of terrorism against Israel, the
rejection of which was initially described as the
principal benefit of that first “breakthrough”
agreement. As the Center for Security Policy has
repeatedly pointed out ⁽¹⁾,
Arafat has repeatedly used speeches in Arabic before
public events in Gaza and Jericho to associate himself
with the “heroes and martyrs” (a.k.a.
terrorists) who have been waging “jihad (or
holy war) via death, via battles” against Israelis.

Last Sunday, though, Arafat went even further at the
event where the new agreement was initialed. He rubbed
the Israelis’ noses in his embrace of terrorists in
English in front of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and the
assembled international press corps. He said: “On
this occasion and from this place, I would like to speak
to our prisoners, to those who were injured, with
greetings, and I assure them that the dawn of freedom is
coming. I also greet the families of our martyrs.”

The ‘Peace in Our Time’ Mentality

What is truly stunning, however, is not the brazen
nefariousness of the likes of Milosevic and Arafat.
Rather, it is the attitude of their American
interlocutors and others in the thrall of the so-called
“peace process.” All too often, preserving that
process becomes an end in itself. Peace processors —
like their mechanical counterparts in the food
preparation business — are adept at mincing, shredding
and pureeing. The difference is that the objects of such
diplomatic machinations are words, principles and
interests, not vegetables. The results achieved in the
name of reaching breakthroughs and preventing breakdowns
with despotic interlocutors are uniformly accords of
fleeting value, if any.

Worse yet, is the price the peace processors like
Holbrooke and his Middle East counterpart, Dennis Ross,
would have the United States pay for such agreements. At
first blush, they might appear to pale by comparison with
the $4-plus billion tab the U.S. might have to pick up
for the last peace process “breakthrough” —
that negotiated with North Korea by Assistant Secretary
of State Robert Gallucci. Still, the blithe way in which
Holbrooke and Ross have evidently committed American
taxpayer-underwritten economic reconstruction and
development assistance should give congressional
oversight committees pause. For example, Ross reportedly
offered to pay for a water project to be built in Hebron
when the negotiations bogged down over that contested
community. This comes on top of the half-a-billion
dollars the President has already promised to the
Arafat-run Palestinian Authority. And then there is the
untold cost — in dollars and probably in American lives
— of the Clinton Administration’s commitment to deploy
25,000 heavily armed troops for peacekeeping operations
in Bosnia in support of Amb. Holbrooke’s deal.

The Bottom Line

To date, Congress has shown itself easily seduced by
platitudes served up by the peace processors and their
admirers in the press. Altogether too few legislators
have asked the sorts of hard questions needed to avoid
American subsidizing of agreements that will, at best,
merely serve to postpone hostilities and, at worst, have
the effect of legitimizing and strengthening the true
enemies of peace. Incredibly, many seem to believe that
it was only in the past — at places like Munich — that
flawed peace processes, conducted under artificial
deadlines by negotiators willing to split the difference
with dictators and gangsters, were capable of producing
results worse than the conflict they were supposed to
stop.

The good news is that some or all of these deals will
probably come a cropper before November 5, 1996. The
question then will not be how much credit should Bill
Clinton be given for his peace processing but how much of
the blame for its failures can he share with the
Congress?

(1) See for example the Center’s Decision
Briefs entitled A Memo for Rabin: Will His
Legacy Be An Israel at Risk And An American
Pro-Israel Community Too Fractured to Help? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=95-D_63″>No. 95-D 63, 18 September 1995)
and Will Senate Give Arafat $500 Million in the
Face of His Ongoing Support for Terrorism, Opposition
From Most American Jews? (No.
95-D 62, 13 September 1995).