Terrorism:
Bastard Child of the Peace Process
By Robert E. Heiler,
Executive Director, IASPS - DC
As the sun rose on
the first day of America’s attack on the Taliban, the
debate that will determine whether our nation has any
hope of success raged on in the editorial pages. The
central question of that debate is whether America’s
policy will be dictated by people of courage or Peace
Processors.
Peace, like cheese,
loses its appeal when processed. The best-case result is
a facsimile of the real thing: a scenario that may look
peaceful, may even temporarily reflect a calmness, and a
cessation of violence. But peace without liberty is the
very definition of successful tyranny. Tyrants, after
all, do not desire armed conflict any more than the rest
of us, if only because it is expensive and because the
possibility that the tyrant may lose exists. A perfect
tyrant would preside over a kingdom of peace without
liberty.
Real peace, which is
to say coexistence under a rule of law that respects the
individual’s rights and safeguards his liberty, cannot
result from negotiation with a sworn enemy. In fact,
terrorism is inextricably connected to this process,
both in the realm of ideas and in observable history.
Terrorism is the bastard child of the Peace Process.
Consider these
examples: Israel and the PLO, Britain and the IRA.
In both cases, the
sovereign government of a Western nation has entered the
Peace Process with a counterpart that carries out
terrorist attacks on its citizens. Both situations
include a “moderate” enclave and a “radical
fringe” element; the sovereign nation is expected, by
itself or others, to “get to the table” and
“hammer out an agreement” with the moderates, to
bring about the comprehensive peace that all allegedly
desire.
When the radical
fringe commits terrorist acts, which uncannily seems to
occur at pivotal moments in the negotiations, the
moderates disclaim knowledge, complicity, and most
importantly, ability to have stopped it. The sovereign
nation is then put in a no-win position: respond to the
terrorism, which will halt negotiations, or grieve their
dead and get back to the table.
Now here comes the
point: if the moderates are unwilling to stop the
terrorism, then they are not moderates at all. If they
are unable to do so, then they are not qualified to
represent part of the group that they claim to;
moreover, the part that they fail to represent is the
whole problem, in that it is the part of the group that
kills people. Hence the rational leader of the sovereign
state should either target the moderates as complicit or
ignore them as irrelevant, at least until he has seen to
the safety of his citizens, which is, after all, his
principle function.
So much for the real
world. Now how does terrorism spring from the loins of
the Peace Process in the realm of ideas? It integrates
two fundamentally opposite modes of human interaction,
that is, cooperation and competition. The “process”
is designed to make peace out of conflict, without the
intermediate step of deciding the conflict. It assumes
that all conflicts are open to the process of
compromise, which is to say that no conflict is genuine
in the sense that it will not yield to more perfect
interpersonal understanding. Far from representing an
advance in political thought, it is the political
equivalent of alchemy.
This vain yoking of
opposites actually creates
the terrorist. In any group, there exist gradations of
dedication, a continuum of depth of belief. And the
deepest believers see the moderates’ willingness to
sit at the table as an abomination, as a betrayal of the
group. Moreover, the Peace Process suggests that these
betrayers are the very ones who have the power to change
the status quo. If that sounds like a recipe for taking
the least stable members of the group and impelling them
to utter desperation, that’s because it is. Viola,
a terrorist is born.
All
of this amounts to a complex object lesson in a piece of
homespun wisdom: if you don’t stand up to the bully,
he will continue to take your lunch money and perhaps
administer a blow or two in the bargain. The twist here
is that the bully has chosen to target the toughest kid
on the block. And so the argument that the U.S. must
respond to aggression in a limited, obviously
insufficient way in order to avoid “making more
terrorists” is absurd. What will make more of them is
the Peace Process, which President Bush rightly resisted
by scoffing at the Taliban’s requests to
“negotiate” the handing over bin Laden. If Bush
continues to avoid such attempts to entice America to
enter the Peace Process, the number of terrorists made
will stay within America’s ability to exterminate
them.
 Printer-Friendly
Version
Click here to return to
the Strategic Division homepage
|
