A Palestinian Nation May Lead to a State of Stability

Should the Palestinians get their own country, as President Bush now says? Probably, since nobody else wants them in their country. And the same goes for the semi-country of Afghanistan: The U.S. needs to go in, get rid of Osama bin Laden, do some nation-building, and then put someone in charge in Kabul who will be held responsible for policing the place. Because as both the Palestinians and Afghans prove, peoples without nation-states to keep track of them are big trouble, not only for themselves, but for the world. Somebody must rule, in the name of liberty, monarchy, tyranny-anything but anarchy.

Throughout history, kingdoms, empires-even the occasional short-lived city-state democracy-have existed, but the modern nation-state-a self-conscious entity with a common language and culture, as well as some degree of popular legitimacy-emerged in the 16th and 17th century.

The prophet of this new political organization was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes; the only alternative to a strong government, he said, was life in unstructured nature, which he dismissed as a place of [bq] =93No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.=94 And so he wrote a book, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), which argued for a whale-like government powerful enough to maintain order.

Hobbes was no democrat, but he was on to something.

As a minimum requirement of existence, nation-states need to keep internal peace. And so, despite all the wars that have been fought over the eons, actively suicidal behavior, as seen in, say, Nazi Germany or Khmer Rouge Cambodia, is rather rare. Populations can produce suicide bombers, but political leaders tend to want to be survivors, not martyrs. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein may be evil, but the fact that he has clung to power for 22 years suggests that he also wants to live. Which explains why he probably had no direct hand in the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S.; if the chain of causation could be traced back to him, bye bye Baghdad.

Ditto Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian leader may be wicked, and he seems happy enough to let others kill themselves on his behalf, but he himself is no suicidal Muslim fundamentalist; he has, after all survived for 72 years now, and his wife is a Christian. That’s why Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres has said for years that Arafat is about as good a negotiating partner as Israel is going to get.

And so the argument for Palestinian statehood is that if Palestine is a full-fledged country, with a flag, foreign aid and corner offices, there will be at least a few people around who wish to preserve the perks of their power and not throw it all away in terror attacks against Israel.

To be sure, given the events of the last year, it’s a debatable argument. And yes, it would have been better if such official recognition had come at the end of a chain of diplomatic confidence-building measures, as President Clinton was attempting to link together late in his term. But then, lots of calculations had to change after Sept. 11.

Now, the overriding imperative for the U.S. is eradicating the terror network lurking in Afghanistan. It’s far from obvious that the Taliban regime really knew what Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were doing, but it doesn’t much matter now. The Taliban has had three weeks to expel Bin Laden, and since it will not or cannot hand him over, America has no choice but to go in and grab him.

Yet for logistical reasons alone, the U.S. needs a coalition of nation-states to deal with Afghanistan. The nations of the world may not agree on much, but they tend to agree that violence, and the capacity for violence, should be a state monopoly, not left to freelancers such as Bin Laden.

So there’s reason to hope that some nation-state Leviathan will control the territory and people of Afghanistan, putting a stop to terror, or at least the exporting of it. And the same holds true for Palestine. This isn’t a scenario for liberty and justice for all, but it might spell an end to attacks on the United States.

James P. Pinkerton writes a column for Newsday in New York. E-mail: pinkerto@ix.netcom.com.