THE LOW POINT FOR REAGAN ADMINISTRATION foreign policy came in 1986 when National Security Adviser Bob McFarlane took a cake baked in the shape of a key as a peace offering to “Iranian moderates”–hoping to secure the release of U.S. hostages but in fact triggering the Iran-Contra scandal. The idea that when America is threatened what it really needs to do is propitiate someone–usually not the bad guys but the “not quite so bad guys”–dies hard among American foreign policy experts. Thus today a metaphorical cake was delivered by the State Department to our “Arab allies.” The cake took the form of a coordinated PR offensive by the U.S. government on behalf of a Palestinian state. The story was rolled out simultaneously on the front pages of both the Washington Post, “U.S. Was Set to Support Palestinian Statehood,” and the New York Times, “Before Attacks, U.S. Was Ready To Say It Backed Palestinian State.” On the one hand there is less to this story than meets the eye. The ostensible news–sourced to “administration officials”–is that Secretary of State Colin Powell had been planning (before the Sept. 11 attack) to address the General Assembly and promise U.S. support for a Palestinian state. This would have been the endpoint of some comprehensive Middle East peace settlement brokered by the United States. And Powell’s mothballed speech would have been the first such explicit approval from a Republican administration. But of course, this has been the implicit goal of U.S. policy for more than a decade. And the fond desire of the permanent diplomatic corps for even longer. The problem with this goal, it bears reiterating, is that while it is shared by the U.S. government, bien-pensant elite opinion around the world, and, until recently, many Israelis themselves–including especially the fallen government of former prime minister Barak–Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority rejected it. That is why the Oslo process foundered last year. When it came time to choose between a Palestinian state that would co-exist with Israel, and forgoing such a state so as to keep alive the dream of Israel’s destruction, Arafat chose the latter–double or nothing. That’s why Arafat rolled the dice and launched the second intifada a year ago–the terrorist uprising whose first anniversary was just celebrated with epic tastelessness at a leading Palestinian university (see Not a Parody in this week s Weekly Standard). Now, since the traumatic attack of September 11, there has been a tendency on all sides to grab for one’s most cherished political principles, as one might grab for a security blanket. That the State Department would still cling to its fantasy of brokering the same failed deal with the Israelis and the Palestinians is no doubt in part the reaction of a bureaucracy in shock, trotting out its old talking points. It should not be news, that is, that on any given day there’s a Middle East peace initiative in the works. The fact of that plan’s being trotted out into the spotlights today is what’s news. It was meant to play on the front pages of our largest newspapers, presumably by the Secretary of State. We cannot know what the precise object of this demarche is, except that it is likely a symbolic offering of goodwill to Arab states whose support we are trying to muster. Whether it has been offered in payment of some boon already granted or in anticipation of one to come, we can’t now know. Not knowing that, a certain amount of judgment must be withheld. But not all judgment. Propitiation, history shows, is a terribly risky course, all the more so when wounds have already been inflicted. It may well be that the president, for his own reasons, is giving the secretary of state everything he asks for to try things his way. President Bush certainly seems to have been supportive of the Palestinian State overture at a press briefing this morning, as was his spokesman, Ari Fleischer. Then again, a hugely popular Gen. George B. McClellan–who believed that success in war came from preparation, preparation, and still more preparation–had the full support of his commander in chief at the outset of the Civil War. Even as we withhold judgment, we can at least ask for moral clarity. Surely it does no good, even in the interest of alliance-building, to blur the distinction between terrorism and the response to terrorism. The next time the State Department decides to make Palestinian statehood the message of the day, they should write some better talking points for the president. “We are fully committed to working with both sides to bring the level of terror down to an acceptable level for both,” the president said early Tuesday. Is it really the position of the U.S. government that Israel has been committing acts of terror? Isn’t it the central principle of U.S. foreign policy today that no level of terror is acceptable? Richard Starr is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
