Negotiations or self-delusion?

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

The French have a word for it: deformation professionelle. Roughly translated, a logic fault, the product of your métier, your profession, your trade. If you are a surgeon, you tend to see the cure for any illness as surgery. If you are a cybernetic engineer, you tend toward statistical calculations as revelatory truth. And if you are a diplomat, you believe that negotiations can settle all international disputes.

The problem arises when a diplomat representing a democratic society, attuned to compromise under the rule of law, meets up with an opponent from a pariah nation masking his real intent. A successful negotiation must provide an outcome. But if the “negotiating partner” is unyielding, our democrat gives ground in order to have that vaunted success. Thus all during the Cold War Washington was wont to concede more and more to the immovable Moscow. The “compromise” simply turned into a giveaway. Thus Yalta, where Franklin Rosevelt turned over Central and Eastern Europe to Soviet domination.[The sad history of the 1930s is replete with such negotiations with the Nazis, Fascists and Japanese militarists.] Then came the sordid history of “Vietnam” and “Korea” “negotiations”

The smell of this particular deformation profssionelle is in the air again.

Norwegian deputy foreign minister Vidar Helgesen, trying to negotiate an end to Sri Lanka’s 20-year civil war, warns his negotiations may even be moving too fast. Helgesen is dealing with a monster, the Tamil Tigers [LTTE] “ supremo” Velupillai Prabhakaran, and a battered Sri Lankan government. Prabhakaran invented the so-called “suicide bomber”, murdering hundreds of Sri Lankan officials and former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, by sacrificing lives of young Tamil women and men. Now Prabhakaran says he is ready for compromise, abandoning an independent state in Sri Lanka [if no mention of his unpublicized goal of an independent Tamil state incorporating India’s 65- million Tamils].

It apparently does not occur to Helgesen that he may be following other Norwegian peacemakers who crafted the so-called Oslo Accords, which were to bring Mideast peace. Then, too, well-intentioned Norwegian peacemakers helped foist a “settlement” on the world. [What is there in the water in Scandinavia that creates this delusion of solving other people’s problems with no resources? the Nobel Peace prize?]. Conventional wisdom now, of course, is that the solution was correct but PLO leader Yasser Arafat missed an opportunity. Might it just have been that Arafat never intended to accept it, that he wants the whole loaf – the eradication of Israel, an Arab state in all of the former British Mandate of Palestine which is where all this began in 1948? Could Prabhakaran simply want to use the Bangkok negotiations next month as a breather in a war he has been losing lately? And that like Arafat, he will use whatever means to reach that end? [The PLO conducted the training camps in India -- at which Raji Gandhi’s mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi winked -- which spurred the Tamil’s revolt.]

The pseudo-sophisticates snicker at Bush’s [and Reagan’s] characterization of “evil” in the world. Yet regimes and movements that would use any means toward an end are “evil”. And their intentions are masked, often, by what the old Freudians called “projection” – the belief that our own attitudes [necessity for compromise] and behavior [norms of diplomacy] are those of our opponent’s as well.

In late April China’s Pres. Jiang was in Iran firming up new trade in weapons of mass destruction that Beijing has been supplying. Yes, it may well be true that there is opposition to Tehran’s theocratic hardliners. But we have almost daily proof that Tehran is collaborating with remnants of Al Qaeda, with the Hizb’allah, with Hamas, enabling their terror. Iranian agents were in on the attack on the U.S. embassy in Bahrain in mid-April. Tehran supplied weapons to Arafat intercepted through Israeli and American surveillance. Earlier, Iranians were linked to the attack on an American barracks in Saudi Arabia, perhaps to the Marines killed still earlier in Beirut.

Meanwhile, China’s Prime Minster Zhu has been touring Arab states to preach Beijing’s anti-U.S. “multipolarism”. Given China’s growing domestic crisis, including an unresolved succession struggle and faltering economy, their Middle East efforts are taking a high priority. Add this to evidence of Arafat’s growing reliance for leverage on Tehran and its terrorist network, not only against Israel and the U.S., but against the various Arab regimes, and it becomes clearer Washington policymakers face a new strategic situation. That combination poses as great a threat to America’s war on terrorism as Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction.

Negotiations and diplomacy, no doubt, have their role in a world always fraught with danger. But to delude ourselves about the nature of the enemy could be a greater danger than the failure of purported negotiated settlements.