Why peace processes fail

Recently, Meryl, Daled Amos and I have both written about the perverse incentives and results of the peace procdess.

Now Bret Stephens writes about how Peace Processes never work:

But he misses a deeper point. Even as peace processes almost invariably fail between the warring parties, they also almost invariably succeed as political theater for the peace processors themselves. Kim Dae Jung, Arafat and Shimon Peres all burnished their prestige with Nobel Peace Prizes. President Obama won one pre-emptively. And Mr. Clinton still basks in an ill-founded reputation as a peacemaker. Ironically, the only real peace he ever achieved, in the Balkans, was through the strength of American arms.

Think about the dynamic. After years of efforts the diplomats get the two parties together. Talking rather than fighting is determined to be the primary goal of the negotiations. (Or “peace” such as it is, is assigned an infinite value.)

Now say the bad guys violate some principle. There are three choices: insist that the bad guys desist, declare that the negotiations have failed or convince the good guys to overlook the breach. The first choice is too difficult. The second choice, because of the value given the process is unthinkable. The third choice is the path of least resistance.

But once you’ve ruled out the first two choices, what if the good guys say, “Enough, we won’t tolerate this?” Then you can bring pressure against the good guys, who are vulnerable to internal political pressure. If they refuse to overlook the violations, you say they are being unreasonable and are acting against the interests of peace. It doesn’t really matter. The peace process has become the end intself rather than the means to an end.

For a concrete example, think about 1996. In early 1996 Hamas unleashed a wave of suicide bombings against Israel that killed over 60 Israelis. Israelis, who, when they accepted the peace process, thought that Arafat had changed and would prevent terror, started retreating from support of the process and the Labour government that championed it. So what did President Clinton do? He organized as “summit of the peacemakers” and invited every Arab leader (including Hafez Assad, who refused to come despite Clinton’s pleas). Arafat, despite his failure to act against Hamas (and likely despite his tacit support of Hamas) was invited too. The purpose of this grotesque charade was to forestall the likely (and eventual) election of Binyamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel. Clinton prized Arafat’s phony participation in the peace process above the democratic process in Israel. (Clinton should not have been surpised byt Arafat’s rejection of peace at Camp David in 2000; Clinton is the one who showed Arafat that there were no consequences to his perfidies.)

Note: I added to and changed this article slightly from what I first posted.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.