Stardate 20030118.1804

(On Screen): Sometimes terms take on a life of their own, lasting well beyond the point where they make any sense, if they ever did at all. One of those terms was "peace process", for instance. For something like 20 years, there was this mythical "Middle East Peace Process" which represented a hope for an end to the struggle between the Israelis and sundry Arabs, external and internal.

In some senses, I suppose there was process in it. After 1973 (the Yom Kippur war) there has never been another serious threat of an attack by an Arab nation against Israel, and that is indeed an accomplishment. But it didn't really happen because of any kind of process towards peace. It appears to have happened for two reasons: America bought off the Egyptians and Jordanians (and continues to pay them vast amounts of money, every year), and Israel developed nukes and let the Arabs know about it. The real reason there hasn't been any attack on Israel since then is because the next time there's a formal military attack, Cairo and Damascus are going to be vaporized. However, that threat didn't work against the Palestinians, nor did it prevent the Arab nations from surreptitiously supporting various Palestinian factions. So low level war has been chronic in the region for the entire thirty years since the Yom Kippur war.

And yet, during the 1980's and 1990's I kept hearing about the "stalled peace process", "getting the peace process moving again", "discussing the peace process", and on and on, and somehow the difficulty was that there wasn't any peace, and there damned well didn't seem to be any process. Maybe that's because to me, as a systems engineer, a "process" is actually an orderly sequence of steps toward a defined goal, and what we actually saw was floundering and setbacks and confusion and multiple incompatible approaches and basically something which was about as un-process-like as it could be.

That particular term seems mostly to have fallen by the wayside, though you still occasionally hear it. Even after the failure of the last serious attempt to deal with the Palestinians, and the beginning of the Intifada, you still heard people talking about how we were going to get the peace process started again. It was when Bush decided, last year, that Arafat was the problem, and that peace was impossible as long as Arafat was involved, that the term "peace process" finally seems to have gone to the political graveyard of dead rhetoric. But don't be too surprised if it shows up again in future; this kind of term has more lives than a cat, mostly because those who are using it are advocating, not describing. The reason there was so much talk about a peace process wasn't that it actually existed so much as that a lot of people wished it did and were trying to build a fire under various politicians to make them buy such a "process" (by giving things away to get one).

Another term I'm finding myself becoming more and more uncomfortable with recently is "ally". If a process is an orderly sequence of steps toward a goal, then allies are entities who work together to achieve a shared goal. So when I see a headline reading "Allies resist U.S. war aims" then on one level I find myself thinking that it's internally contradictory: if they're resisting the goal, then by definition they're not allies, at least within the context of the discussion. They can't be allies if they don't share the goal, and if they did share the goal they wouldn't be resisting it. That headline is nonsensical on its face.

Of course, pure unity of purpose in an alliance is a rare boon; there's always a certain amount of difference of opinion. Yet in any successful alliance there will be some sort of very large and unambiguous goal that all agree is the primary purpose of the alliance, even if there are differences of opinions about the means by which that goal should be accomplished. And usually that shared goal will be easily stated and very straightforward.

The Anglo-American alliance in WWII was motivated by a very simple goal: eradicate Hitler. With any peoples as self-confident and motivated and bull-headed as the Brits and Americans, there were bound to be disagreements, some of which were bound to become extremely vicious. The crowning achievement of Eisenhower was to put together an integrated military command made up of British and American officers which was actually able to fight effectively, and not dissolve in partisan bickering. (Eisenhower was a political general rather than a battlefield general, and his talents fit the requirements of SHAEF better than almost any other British or American general I know of. One can imagine, for instance, what would have happened if Montgomery had commanded SHAEF.)

NATO's purpose was to prevent a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. It did a lot of other things over the decades, but that was the main job and everyone pretty much understood it. There were cases in which there were bitter arguments about how best to accomplish that, and France actually withdrew from NATO, but the overall goal was never in doubt during the Cold War and even during the years when France wasn't part of NATO there could be no doubt that the French Army would have fought if there'd been a Warsaw Pact invasion.

But the Cold War is over, and the Soviet Union won't be invading Western Europe because there no longer is a Soviet Union, and it's no longer clear