I had a discussion with a friend this evening regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. My friend, an establishment Democrat, expressed what can reasonably be described as a centrist pre-9/11 view of the issue. I say pre-9/11 because it's hard to gauge how much the nation has, like me, shifted firmly into the pro-Israel camp. He certainly wishes no harm to Israel and, like most people in the US, wishes both camps to be able to live side-by-side in peace. The discussion was a disappointment in many levels because he, with a generally moderate temperament, has remained... well, with a moderate temperament.

Ordinarily, I would applaud this point of view as I am not generally prone to extremity in any particular direction. Unfortunately, there are times when moderation is insufficient and fair-mindedness gives the advantage to the obstinate. Indeed, there are times when obstinance must be met with obstinance. Israel is one of the clearest cases of this that comes to mind.

However, let's approach this logically and from a neutral standpoint so that we can see if we can find an agreement that is acceptable to both sides.

What my discussion with my friend came down to, and what all discussions will eventually come down to, is whether or not peace is possible and what to do in the apparent absence of its possibility. My friend is of the view that no matter how seemingly impossible peace between the two sides is, we cannot stop striving for it. We cannot accept perpetual violence. My view, as best articulated by another generally apolitical friend, is that we are in a sense obsessed with peace. All things being equal, peace is obviously infinitely better than war. The problem generally arises when peace, or in this case the mere striving for it, leaves one side or the other in worse shape than they would be in if they were at war. To put it another way, there are some things worth fighting for. In this case, it's Israel's right to exist.

To some of the more "fair-minded" observers of the conflict, this is lost. They are missing the trees for the forest and are so wound up in objectivity that they fail to recognize the subjectivity of human nature. Reasonable people can agree to disagree, but it only takes unreasonable party to render the discussion moot. Where the fair-minded see a Venn Diagram where interests overlap, many of us see two entirely separate circles the closest points of which are miles apart.

Within the Israeli circle is the belief that they should exist, where they are, without continued fear of their existence. They do not desire to see the Muslims driven out of the Middle East (how could they?). While they may desire to see an Israel free of any and all Palestinians, they have take actions to make it happen despite having the military resources to do so. This arguably could be because they know that over-zealousness might incur the wrath of neighboring countries or they might simply tolerate the Palestinians because they believe that they are, in their current state, not an inherent threat to the existence of Israel. In either case, we can safely, and even objectively, conclude that will not be driving all of the Palestinians out of Israel.

Within the Palestinian circle is the belief that Israel's existence in the region is illegitimate. Only recently and only in English have they acknowledged that Israel has a right to exist. While this might sound like a starting point, they have done very little, if anything at all, to demonstrate that they are sincere in this belief. Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's comments in Arabic have been markedly different than his ones in English. Furthermore, when former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians almost everything they wanted, Arafat refused and the Second Infitada began. One might be able to conclude from this that if the Israelis gave the Palestinians everything that they want, violence might possibly cease.

The idea of this occurring is too tempting for the peacemongerers, such as my friend and Tom Friedman of the New York Times, to resist. Indeed, Friedman recently pushed a Saudi Arabian proposal to move to the pre-1967 borders in order for assurances of Israel's security. Israel was skeptical, but Prime Minister Sharon called for a week-long ceasefire as a demonstration of good-will and seriousness. This was, however, too much to ask of Arafat because out of either incompetence or fraud, violence quickly picked up and details of the Saudi proposal, such as the reclaiming of land by the Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza Strip, left too much to be desired when it came to Sharon's view of what was necessary to protect Israel. This has led to the current state of chaos that has ensued.

So there you have it. In 2000, Barak offered more than what most Israelis were willing to concede and it was rejected by the Palestinians. Barak himself was electorally deposed for his efforts and replaced with someone considerably less diplomatic. In 2002, a plan proposed by Saudi Arabia was rejected by both the Israelis and Palestinians as insufficient. These circles just don't meet. So even leaving aside whose demands are more reasonable, war at this point is inevitable.

"But still," voices cry out, "we must try something. We cannot let the violence and bloodshed continue." Carried with this plea is the implied, but not often expressed and therefore rarely challenged, question of "what harm can there be in trying?"

Again, leaving out the moral implications who is right and wrong, there is procedurally much harm to be done in trying. Israel's actions are, for the most part, a top-down operation. If Sharon orders an attack, it's carried out. If Sharon orders his men to pull back, they do. If they do not, it is within Sharon's power to relieve them of their duties. Sharon, as the head of a state and commander of an army, is held accountable for his actions.

Palestinian actions, on the other hand, are considerably more de-centrilized. The fighters on the Palestinian side are not soldiers in a hierarchal army. They are instead an independent network of agents who take orders from several locations. Therefore, it is possible that even if Arafat is truly a peace-loving individual, he is powerless to stop the actions of Hamas and similar independent entities. Therefore, to the extent that Arafat does want peace, he is incapable and therefore not always accountable for the actions of his people. That means that to effectively create peace, we would not only need the approval of Arafat, but we would also need the approval of the leaders of each and every one of the independent entities that has declared Israel its mortal enemy. In the past, we have generally left it to Arafat to get his people in line and he has been unable, or unwilling, to do so. Indeed, Hamas and Hizbollah have claimed that nothing short of the elimination of Israel would satisfy them.

That, to say the least, is unacceptable to the Israelis. Therefore, by asking Israel to step down and being incapable of making the Palestinians step down, we are creating a strategic environment very favorable to Palestine. So even by trying to be objective and to not take sides, we are de facto taking the side of the Palestinians. It is within our rights to do so if we choose, but we are unable to expect the Israelis to simultaneously accept our opposing position and do as we ask them to.

In a Constitution Theory class I've mentioned before, the liberal-minded professor would occasionally get off-topic. On one such occasion, Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War and makes some allusions between Athens and the United States. The thesis basically was that the US could learn a thing or two about how the Athenians fell. Athens had become alienated and engraged its neighbors. So much so, that they rised in rebellion against them. A couple years before, a professor in a humanities requirement asked us if we saw certain parallels between Athens and the United States. The correct answer was yes.

I don't remember a whole lot of the specifics of Thucydides work, though I'd like to go back over it and read it again some time. What I do remember, though, was the impression that we were more like Sparta than Athens. Sparta was a very serious, insular warrior culture with a strong work ethic while Athens seemed more culture-minded and, as time progressed, became arrogant and got their comeuppance during that war. It's that last part where people draw the connection.

The argument goes that the United States has become arrogant and so drunk with its power that it is alienating everyone else, much as Athens did. The implied solution is for the United States to stop being so heavy-handed and start engaging the world in a more egalitarian manner. The US will not be on top of the heap forever, and our arrogance will be our downfall. While I agree with the notion that the United States utter dominance of the rest of the world is likely impermanent, I don't agree with their proposed remedies.

They suggestion that our collapse is imminent and we should turn our eye towards softening the fall will only hasten it. Their seems to be an assumption that we are on top by a matter of luck or something that is out of our control. This is where we part company. I believe that we are on top because we work smarter, work harder, and have a society that encourages innovation like no other. We do not dominate the world because we starve our children to fund our military. We dominate because we don't have to starve our children. We dominate because militarily because we dominate economically. The entire concept of hegemony is based on economics. We don't go to India with guns in hand and tell them that we will install a McDonald's there of they will die. Instead, we offer them money, which they can pump into their economy and that makes them financially better off. If it didn't they would stop accepting our offers. It's not a matter of bribing the leadership, either. The more democratic a nation is, the more likely they are to have a McDonald's.

As long as our economy remains unsurpassed, we will remain on top. Of course, there are those (Will Hutton comes to mind) that suggest that our successful economy is a fluke and eventually it will be demonstrated by one and all that there is a better way. If so, I have yet to hear it. Japan looked like a threat for a while and made us re-examine our corporate structure, but in the end their financial system got the better of them. They were not successful because of their system, they were successful because of their awesome work ethic. It is in fact their system that lead to their collapse. Socialist Europe has been on the skids for some time now as barriers to innovation are constantly put up. The communitarianism over there does not make them stronger, rather it ties them down. We remain successful because we are not tied down. Unsuccessful and bad ideas are rejected and replaced when they don't work (when we're at our best, anyway), whereas there they are not. It is all issued from the top down. In the US, it's bottom up. It all begins with the consumers. A popular criticism is that consumers are merely pawns for the corporations, but really it's the other way around. We the consumers determine who succeeds, who fails, and which ideas carry on and which are abandoned. It is this, not a matter of luck or a gift from God, that makes us successful.

Athens had a superior system, too. However, theirs was based more on culture and governance than production and the military. They simply did not keep themselves strong enough and that left them overextended when the vultures began circling. They never realized this and when the Spartans joined the opposing alliance, they remained overextended until they collapsed. The United States has many faults, but overextention is not one of them. In fact, prior to 9/11 the more common complaint was isolationism. Another complaint that has been en vogue for a while is that we are ignorant of the rest of the world. Would we really be ignorant of it if we were determined to control it? To the extent that we do control it, it is with the compliance mentioned above. If they want to stop our hegemony, they need to find a way to convince their people that McDonald's does not serve good burgers at a good price. Our corporations will then withdraw and we could care less. The problem is that they can't because our products are better and/or cheaper because the ones looking at expanding have learned the rigors of competition by thriving in the competitive US markets. If they weren't better and/or cheaper, they wouldn't be buying them.

Athens became so (rightly) enamored by their (superior) ideals that they became vulnerable from a military standpoint. They were caught in the middle of the inherent conflict between an empire and a democracy. The people were uninspired to fight to their last breath and they lost. Indeed, we too could have fallen victim to that fate. We could have lost sight that before we can even have a culture, we must be able to protect it. Many argued that we indeed already had. September 11th changed all that. Prior to 9-11 we generally had a live-and-let-live attitude. When we got involved in international conflicts, it was generally at the request of the region (this includes the Gulf War). During the Cold War, a superpower was forming that, if had been allowed to grow, could have threatened our own shores. The same can be said for the Axis powers during World War II. September 11th proved to us that Islamism was also such a threat. It proved to us that if we don't engage the world, it will come to us.

We could have reacted by trying to bribe the enemy. It certainly would have been easier. However, it wouldn't have worked and we knew it. We were more concerned with defending ourselves and our way of life than we were in our own petty interests. We decided "never again" and "we will never forget" and have acted accordingly. Unlike the Athenians, we have not lost our sense of purpose. We didn't lose it by becoming an empire like Athens did. We have always been a focused society and our primary focus has always been freedom. We never forced it on the rest of the world because, quite frankly, our freedom has always come first. We intuitively knew that if we overextended, the entire enterprise might collapse. Thus, we avoid the fate of Athens.

Freedom, however, requires security. What we're doing now abroad is ensuring our security at home. What happened in Guantanamo Bay and with the immigrants being detained in the northeast against our stated ideals is to assure us that freedom will be defended. We have not become so enamored with our ideals that we would sacrifice our nation, the embodiment of the pursuit of them, to those who hate such freedom and are determined to destroy it. We have chosen to bloody our cloak so that our ideas will not die with our nation, as Athenian ones did with Athens until they were revived elsewhere. We are an idealistic nation, but realism is required to protect the best of ideas. Athenian democracy made their military response time slower. Their insistance on maintaining the ideals of Athens cost them Athens.If we had placed our ideas above the interest of protecting them, we would be doing the same.

None of this is to say that we should completely forsake our ideas. None of this is to say that there shouldn't be serious discussion whenever we do so. It is to say, however, that the surest way to follow in the footsteps of Athens is to ignore that the survival of our nation is and should always be our utmost concern.

Survival is not mutually exclusive with the unilateralism that would "soften our fall," but often it is. The International Criminal Court being a primary example. By signing on, we would potentially be tieing our hands. To carelessly sign on with the idea "it could never happen to us" would only assure that it would. By signing up for the Kyoto Treaty, we would be sacrificing the economic superiority that keeps our nation on top. That is not to say that it is sometimes in our best interest to limit ourselves, but the Kyoto Treaty was so warped that not even its biggest supporters have signed it and the Senate unanimously rejected it. We approach international issues with our national interest at heart. Signing on to programs that will drag us down and submit us to foreign nations only makes us more vulnerable. If we try to be all things to all people, we will lose the focus that has made us unique and successful. Athens became distracted with its empire. We don't have an empire, but we could very easily be distracted by "international consensus" derived largely by nations hostile to our interests.

There has never been a powerful nation that wasn't hated by the rest of the world. We could drive ourselves crazy trying to make a cushion for the fall or we could avoid falling in the first place. We choose the latter.

This letter to the editor of Newsweek encapsulates what a lot of people feel was the injustice done to Andrea Yates.

JUSTICE OR REVENGE?

As the NEWSWEEK article ?A Crazy System? (Justice, March 25) correctly points out, the Texas statute on insanity is based on the 19th-century English law called the McNaghten rules. Apparently Texans are satisfied to have 19th-century justice applied in their courts. They don?t execute thieves for the theft of a loaf of bread or exile them to Australia, but they still condemn the insane to spend the rest of their lives in prison for criminal acts committed while they are clearly unable to control their behavior. Too bad Rusty and Andrea Yates didn?t buy a home in a state where mentally ill defendants have a chance of receiving treatment for their illness rather than spending 40 years in a state prison. This is revenge, not justice.

Mary Harada
West Newbury, Mass.

I am actually inclined to agree with Ms. Harada. It is too bad that they chose to live in Texas than Massachusetts. I don't want them in my state. If that's the message that Texas sends with the verdict, good!

Could someone please tell me what's so damn important about France? I thought about writing an entry talking about how stupid they've been but I couldn't think of anything better than what has already been written and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that they really aren't even worth the time and effort. They may be a nuclear power, but I can see the French cabinet holding discussions about whether or not retaliation would be proper as Paris is being evacuated from nuclear fallout. Do we need their troops? Not really. Would they offer them? No. Britain and Canada have both been much better allies, despite the grumblings in both countries. Italy, Spain, and East Europe all are better potential allies than France. France often views themselves as the center of the European Community and diplomatically that may be true (along with Germany) at the present time, but there is no substantial reason I can think of why we should allow them to continue harboring these delusions. Something to consider: If we can get Eastern Europe, Italy, Spain, Britain, and Portugal on our side, ours will outnumber theirs in the EU.