| Ira Chernus PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER |
The chance for peace is such a fleeting thing. Blink
and you miss it. Open your eyes again and the guys with the biggest guns have
shot peace down. I left home on Saturday with good reason to think that peace
was coming to the
But it wasn’t a dream. For one day, the chances for
peace in
First
But would Khalilzad, a
card-carrying neocon, sign on to this peace plan just
days after Republicans in Congress had insisted there would never be a
timetable for
When I got home again on June 26 The Times headline read: “Shias cut back
olive branch for insurgents.” The plan that Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki presented to
“Noticeably missing from the final draft was a call
for the Government to recognise the difference
between resistance and terrorist groups and a written invitation for resistance
groups to join a national dialogue. … The published plan also removed a demand
for the Government to agree upon a timeline for the withdrawal of foreign
forces based on the readiness of Iraqi troops. It dropped a pledge to revisit
the constitution and cut a clause on reinstating employees who had jobs in
ministries that had been dissolved under the US-occupation. … Zalmay Khalilzad, the American envoy to
But this bait-and-switch plan can’t possibly mend any
wounds. It will only inflame them, because it is (as an L.A. Times headline said) a “Divisive Plan to Unify
The only thing that’s certain is the role of the
Meanwhile, the administration can proclaim that al-Maliki and Khalilzad have offered
a fine peace plan, which was cruelly rejected by “the insurgents.” That might
mollify some among the
If the Bushies weren’t smart
enough to figure out this trick on their own, they could have learned it from
the government of
Last Saturday the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported
that negotiators for the two major Palestinian factions, Fatah
and Hamas, were very close to agreement on a unified
stand. That would mean a unified Palestinian government offering
When I read the Ha’aretz report of the Fatah-Hamas rapprochement, I knew that an Israeli attack was sure to follow. It was just a question of how they would manage it, in the face of international outrage that was pressuring them to scale back their violence.
The answer came in a predictable way: A Palestinian
group, reportedly involving some Hamas members,
attacked an Israeli military outpost, killing two Israeli soldiers and capturing
a third. These Palestinians want to scuttle the emerging peace plan as much as
the Israelis do. Now Hamas politicans,
from Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh
on down, are busy trying to get the captured Israeli released and get the peace
process back on track. A Ha’aretz
headline summed it plainly: “
If Israeli leaders really wanted peace, they would
explain all this to the world and say:
“We want to help the Hamas political moderates
unite with Fatah. We are ready to negotiate on
whatever plan Palestinians leaders come up with.” Polls show that 90% of
Palestinians will support that plan, as long as
But the Israeli leaders don’t want peace. So they are
blaming all of Hamas for the attack. Though it was an act of war -- the kind of thing
After all, that’s the whole point. Just as the peace
plan engineered by the
The guys with the biggest guns have good reason to shoot down the fleeting dove of peace. They built those biggest guns to prove to the world -- and mostly, I suspect, to themselves -- just how tough they really are. And they feel driven to keep on proving it. So they need an enemy they can shoot at. If they can make it look like they’ve given peace a chance, they get a fig leaf of moral justification to cover their immoral asses and keep the war going.
Oh, by the way, the next time you are chatting with an editor of the New York Times or the Washington Post, ask them why none of this manages to get on their front pages. I’m just curious.
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