Both Democrats and Republicans have said good things about President Bush's world-view for the Middle East and criticism of it has been relatively muted. It's possible that this acquiescence might emanate from a general weariness with the constant tension that comes at us from that part of the world, but whatever the reason, this kind of reception augurs well for the politics of the thing. Good politics put an initial positive glow on the speech, but events will catch up with it soon and that glow will fade.

The speech sounded the right notes. It analyzed the situation in a straightforward way and the language was plain and simple. He tried. But in the end, it said that the way out of the mess in the Middle East is through the creation of a 23rd Arab state: the State Department's 50 year-old two-state solution. While the President left room in the equation (for now) for Sharon to defend Israel, he relies on the silly anti-historical mantra that only negotiation decides issues. A serious effort to bring peace to the region would have left statehood for the Palestinians unaddressed.

Though the two-state solution was the main point of the speech, the media immediately became preoccupied with Arafat's departure from the scene. In focusing on Arafat so intently, they fail to see that he is already irrelevant to any peace process. What they miss is that Arafat is and always has been one-dimensional. He only matters when he makes war and does that only when he's allowed to. For example, Israel's aggressive response to his violence today denies him the ability to make war and marginalizes him.

This is not the first time this has happened in his long and bloody career. The Jordanians emasculated him in the 1970s and he was defanged in Beirut in 1982. When he tries to kill and his victims fight back, he's made ineffective, impotent, and irrelevant. Like he is now.

This over-attention to Arafat reminds us that what is said is not as important as what people hear. What's overlooked here is that Israel has the superior legal, historical, and moral claim to the land. The world forgets that whatever decision Israel makes about the land, which she controls because of the defensive war she fought in 1967, is Israel's to make. Ignoring this reality concedes to Arafat and his terrorist killers part of the right to determine how things are decided and in effect, Arafat & Co. will have murdered their way to the bargaining table. The Arabs don't want to eliminate Israel any less now than they have in the past. If nothing else, they've learned how easy it is to manipulate the West and the President just reaffirmed that for them again in his speech. If instead of acceding to undeserved nationhood for another despotic Arab regime, President Bush had taken statehood off of the table, violence would have been discouraged and the peace that everyone wants might be closer.

But with all this talk of statehood, negotiation, and democracy, this becomes Oslo all over again. The Arabs are encouraged and given hope. In 1964, they declared themselves a people and proceeded to kill anyone who stood in the way of that claim. In 1967, they claimed that they were victims and got the support of the Arab world. With Arab and Muslim countries in favor, Europe and then Bill Clinton's America (not to mention self-deluding Israelis like Rabin, Peres, and Beilin) agreed to their peoplehood and need for a nation-state. And now with the President's speech, they've proved that the most moral nation on earth, the last bastion of the rule of law, a country that is under the same attack that Israel is, can be moved to their side of the equation on the ultimate and all-important question of a Palestinian state. How good can it get? If the two-state solution was so easy to get, why not just one?

Democratization, though an admirable goal, is impossible to achieve at this time and in this place.

And then there is all this talk of a Palestinian democracy. With all due respect to Natan Sharansky, a democratic polity is necessary for peace, but creating one takes much more than willing it. We needed a Washington, Franklin, or a Madison to get it done here, but it is unlikely that a Jefferson has been born to a Palestinian family yet, and if he were, it would take many years to make the Arab people receptive to his message.

With Secretary of State Colin Powell proudly looking on, President Bush reached back to the Jimmy Carter era to propose the same formula that worked so poorly throughout Africa: one-man/one-vote/one-time.

Arafat instantly answered the President's call for democratic reform with the announcement of his candidacy for the called-for next election. Now Powell needs to advise the President concerning the probability of Arafat or his hand-picked candidate winning the election and it places the speech's ideas about democracy in a different context. Democratization, though an admirable goal, is impossible to achieve at this time and in this place. Who really believes that a people so full of hate could be capable of democratic nation-building? Socialism's faith in the ability to change human nature lives in this proposal just as it did in the Soviet Union for most of the last century.

The path to democracy lies some place in the

July-August 2002               - 3 -               Outpost