So Much Process, So Little Peace: Lessons for the opponents of terrorists.

Since 9/11, the West has waged a robust war on terrorism. One failed state that sheltered international terrorists, Afghanistan, was invaded and is currently being pacified. One rogue state that assisted terrorism (most notoriously by subsidizing Palestinian suicide bombers), Iraq, has been liberated and is now being reconstructed. And within the United States the government has adopted a firm stress on national security that has even included detaining people suspected of involvement in terrorism for immigration violations that might otherwise have been ignored or lightly punished.

While authorities rightly caution that the terrorists may still succeed in striking the occasional dramatic blow, perhaps killing or maiming thousands of innocent people, al-Qaeda looks weakened and in retreat -- and this has led to a significant change in official Western attitudes to terrorism. Until now, the assumptions guiding Western policy in terrorist conflicts from Israel to Northern Ireland have been the liberal ones that terrorism is ineradicable, there is no military solution to it, negotiations with terrorist groups are therefore necessary, and ultimately political concessions to them will prove unavoidable. These assumptions led in turn to the popularity of the so- called "peace process" as an alternative to what were assumed to be endless anti-terrorist military campaigns. The Oslo accords, the Good Friday Agreement, and now the Mideast "road map" are all examples of the peace process. They are rooted in the assumption -- not in itself unreasonable -- that complex and intractable problems such as the Mideast conflict cannot be solved in a single bound: Each disputed item has to be separately negotiated, with the most difficult one left for last. This gives negotiators an incentive not to discard all their previous agreements when they finally reach the crucial issue.

Another incentive is that while negotiations are being held, and later while any step-by-step deal is being implemented, both sides will call a cease-fire. Terrorism then stops, and a temporary nervous peace ensues. Peace is therefore the process of negotiations as much as the final settlement. Or so the theory goes. And a great deal of political capital has been invested in this theory by Britain's Tony Blair, by the Israeli Labor party, by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and President George Bush more recently, and by many others. Even though the other option -- the military solution -- seems to be getting rid of global terrorism, the "peace process" remains the favored remedy for the Ulster and Palestinian problems.

But just how successful have these various peace processes been? Have they actually culminated in peace? Or have they merely increased the standing and respectability of the terrorists? Or -- a third possibility -- have they made some important gains while failing overall? Given that the Mideast road map is still in its earliest stages, the best answers to these questions are to be found in Oslo and the Good Friday Agreement. In both cases the results have fallen well short of success.

The deal Oslo held out to Israel was that Yasser Arafat would halt or repress terrorism and end the first intifada in return for Israel's acceptance of a Palestinian Authority. For seven years, though, Israel delivered on its side of the bargain -- and terrorism steadily intensified. Arafat sometimes claimed to be unable to halt the terrorism and occasionally imprisoned Hamas terrorists. But the Hamas imprisonments were a revolving door; Arafat's own groups were plainly involved in terrorism under the second intifada; and the PA encouraged insane hatred of Israel through its controlled mass media. Neither the Israeli government nor the U.S. penalized Arafat for these breaches. Oslo collapsed only in 2000, when Arafat rejected the largest concessions ever offered by an Israeli government and was welcomed home by Palestinian crowds. This confirmed all the criticisms of Oslo advanced by Israeli right-wingers; whereupon the Israeli electorate voted in Likud's Ariel Sharon in a landslide.

In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein-IRA agreed to end violence in return for the establishment of all-Ireland institutions, ...