Special Section: At War - Peace, False and True: The necessity of war.

Before his election in November 1992, Bill Clinton spoke of the Middle East peace process as if it were a cooing infant: "I think that we have to give this peace process a chance to work. We have to nourish it; we have to support it; we have to maintain its continuity." Even after eight years of failed diplomacy, including Barak-Arafat negotiations that led directly to more violence, the peace process still held Clinton's affection: "The violence does not demonstrate that the quest for peace has gone too far-but that it has not gone far enough. And points not to the failure of negotiations-but to the futility of violence and force."

Eight months, more dead bodies, and a new administration later, Washington-at least until the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks- still hadn't entirely given up on the peace process.

For such a fragile thing, needing constant nurturing and support, the peace process seems pretty durable: It, or the notion of it, survives most any act of violence, hatred, and war. As British political thinker Michael Howard writes, "Throughout human history mankind has been divided between those who believe that peace must be preserved, and those who believe that it must be attained." In the current Middle East crisis, that first school of thought is so stubborn that it insists on trying to "preserve" a peace that doesn't exist, a peace that is a fantasy overlaid on the bloody facts on the ground, the mortar attacks, the ambushes, the suicide bombers.

"War appears to be as old as mankind," wrote Sir Henry Maine in the 19th century, "but peace is a modern invention." Our way of thinking of peace today is an Enlightenment one: It is a peace, as Howard puts it, "resulting not from some millennial divine intervention that would persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb, but from the forethought of rational human beings who had taken matters into their own hands." Peace, in other words, as the end-result of a rational process. This is the idea of peace that was originally formulated by 19th-century thinkers like Kant and Bentham, that animated Woodrow Wilson and, after him, all the hopeful appeasers between the two world wars, and that eventually passed through Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, in particularly self-righteous and unctuous forms, respectively.

It is one of contemporary liberalism's most stubborn, characteristic, and dangerous ideas. It has seeped into the way we think about all international conflicts, and seems to influence every administration, regardless of party. It's an idea that depends on a combination of legalism, illusory rationalism, and sentimentality. This faulty idea of peace often provides an opening for terrorists and tyrants to exploit the naive intentions of their civilized adversaries, working their will by force and eventually creating the conditions for a war on terms much less favorable to those who had no taste for it in the first place. When it comes to the Middle East, it is the idea to which Israeli civilians routinely-and now American civilians, massively-have been sacrificed.

It was Kant who first came up with the notion of a "league of nations" that would provide for collective security and nudge war toward obsolescence. Ever since, earnest peacemakers have sought to achieve the perfect international covenant, one that would define war out of existence. Wilson was the most ambitious. As Donald Kagan points out in his masterpiece, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, Wilson shared the assumptions of the British appeasers between the two world wars. There was no need to keep a boot on the neck of Germany, because everything could be hammered out with international agreements or bodies, foremost among them the League of Nations.

This legalism makes it necessary to view nations and their leaders as rational and reasonable actors. International agreements aren't possible or effective unless all parties are amenable, first to persuasion, and then to the restraints of various parchment boundaries. It is difficult for people with this worldview to take account of the atavistic and savage impulses of peoples and their leaders. This is why most enthusiasts of the Middle East peace process can never admit that the balance of Palestinian opinion favors pushing Israel into the sea, or that it might cheer the murder of thousands of innocent Americans.

Despite its rationalist assumptions, peace-process liberalism usually also depends on a fair amount of hokum, of sentiment and delusion. After Israel and Jordan signed a peace agreement in 1994, Clinton said, "Peace is more than an agreement on paper; it is feeling, it is activity, it is devotion." Because it depends on leaders talking things out, a peace process creates the illusion that important disputes can be boiled down to matters of personality. The New York Times reported in July 2000, "The success of the summit meeting could well depend . . . on whether the president's personal chemistry can help overcome obstacles of history and the calculus of political survival embedded in these high-stake negotiations." All of this woolly thinking and hopefulness was captured in the phrase "the spirit of Oslo," implying that peace was just a pep rally away.

The phrase echoes "the spirit of Locarno," the era of good feeling that was supposed to accompany the 1925 agreements-between, primarily, Britain, France, and Germany-purporting to cement the post-World War I peace once and for all. British foreign minister Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Neville, told the House of Commons that the agreements were "yet more valuable for the spirit that produced them." In cold strategic terms, as Donald Kagan points out, Locarno was a victory for Germany because it effectively detached Poland and Czechoslovakia (excluded from the agreements) from their natural ally France, and prevented France from responding militarily to any German provocation. But because it made everyone feel good, none of that was thought to matter.

Later, when Neville Chamberlain continued-against all reason-to pursue a policy of appeasement, he seemed driven by personal pride. And why not? He had been vouchsafed a shining vision of humanity's future, a future that he could guarantee with his sparkling mind and intentions. "British leaders easily were persuaded by the liberal and radical intellectuals of the day who rejected traditional ideas of power balances and military strength as devices for keeping the peace," Kagan writes. "They thought they had a new vision, different from and superior to all previous ones, and often these views were oddly combined with a self-righteous religiosity that believed that sin and evil could be overcome successfully by the example of unilateral virtue, trust, and good will."

Who else does that sound like? Bill Clinton deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, if for nothing else, for so thoroughly soaking up the attitudes of peace-process liberalism. There was seldom a treaty he didn't pant to sign. He was tone-deaf to the considerations of national interest and honor that might prompt nations to act in unexpected ways, and so was baffled, for instance, when India set off a nuclear bomb and its people danced in the streets out of sheer joy. And finally, there was the pride: in his own peaceful vision, in his warmheartedness and intelligence that would charm away the furies in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. George W. Bush, with his humbler view of both government's capacities and his own, doesn't take so naturally to the idea of the peace process, although the foreign-policy establishment has tried to bully him into it.

If pride characterizes many believers in peace-making, cowardice often does as well. If not an active cowardice, at least an unwillingness to face facts squarely, to act decisively to deter an adversary or force a war before he has become too powerful. Indeed, it is the unquestioned capability and political willingness to wage war that can achieve peace most assuredly. This means giving up the comfortable pretensions of the peace-talker and the equivocations of the careful diplomat, and making a choice. It requires moral courage.

And this leads us to probably the worst mistake of peace-process liberalism-the way it tends to ignore the morality of war-making (in the right circumstances, of course). Were there any other developments that did so much to advance the cause of human happiness and freedom in the 20th century as the Western victories in World War II and then the Cold War? War is a force for good, so long, of course, as the right side wins.

In his new book Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson connects the West's prowess at warfare over the last couple of millennia to the fact that it is the right side. Its values, its spirit of free inquiry, its respect for property rights, and its democratic self-governance create the conditions for technologically advanced, prodigiously equipped, high-morale armies. Indeed, it is the cultural superiority of Westernized, democratic Israel that would help ensure its victory over the poor, disorganized kleptocracy of the Palestinian Authority.

And if they don't succeed in advancing Western values, wars at the very least usually bring clarity. In long-running conflicts there is something to be said for one side's finally winning. Edward Luttwak made this point in a July 1999 Foreign Affairs article: "Imposed armistices . . . artificially freeze conflict and perpetuate a state of war indefinitely by shielding the weaker side from the consequences of refusing to make concessions for peace." Yasser Arafat today can direct a terrorist war against Israeli civilians precisely because the West intervened to save him from the consequences of his military defeat in Lebanon in 1982.

The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks should serve to strip away the assumptions of peace-process liberalism, at least for now, at least until this persistent illusion has time to reassert itself. In the meantime, world opinion should give Israel broad latitude if it decides to wage full war on its tormentors. It won't be the war that is immoral, but the conduct that prompted it; it won't be its winners who are blameworthy, but its losers. As for the U.S. response to the September 11 attackers, it should be fierce and unrelenting, serving the cause that animates virtually all just wars: establishing the peace in a way that half-measures and wishful negotiations never can.