Column: Diplomacy: A year in review
(01/08/03 5:00am)
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Experience has shown that appeasement of terrorists is both futile and foolhardy. By flagrantly violating the most basic moral precept--respect for innocent human life--terrorist groups and governments that actively support them have placed themselves outside the realm where negotiation is a plausible option. The Sept. 11 attacks, Bali bombings and the Moscow hostage crisis have shown that force is the only viable method of stopping adversaries who have utterly devalued life, even their own. Regrettably, it appears that the one exception to this rule that the United States had kept after Sept. 11-negotiation with the regime of Yasser Arafat--is growing more and more untenable.
Groucho Marx famously remarked that "I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would accept me as a member." It is too bad that the seven East European countries recently invited to join NATO don't share his sentiment. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (got all that?) were formally given the nod at a summit in Prague, and as much as I hate to be the naysayer, this is not the momentous and historic occasion it was hyped up to be.
Our government as of late has been resembling the Romanoff dynasty more and more. There are now more federal policy "czars"--all-powerful expert administrators--than at any time in the nation's history.
One glance at a list of the worst terrorist attacks in the past two decades shows their immense geographical diversity. This has truly been a global problem, with terrorists making no distinction between countries large and small, rich and poor. But until Oct. 12, the South Pacific has been largely spared by the terrorist wave sweeping the globe. In a region that rarely dabbles in power politics, many governments adopted the tempting fallacy that "it can't happen here." And yet it did.