Author: Richard Cohen

In about a week, the Bush administration has done in Iraq what the Johnson administration took more than a year to do in Vietnam: opened a credibility gap. This one is about “the plan,” which the Bush administration describes as both “brilliant” and on schedule. As anyone can see — and as some field commanders keep saying — it is neither.

By rank, I rose no higher than Pfc. in the Army, so my inclination is simply to (smartly) salute my superiors and accept what they say. Nevertheless, I wonder about a timetable that increasingly threatens one of the stated goals of this war — to bring the manifest blessings of democracy to the entire Arab world. By the time we get around to doing that, the regimes we want reformed may well be history and replaced by ones that are at our throat.

Last winter in Europe I met with an important Arab leader who, like George Bush, wanted Saddam Hussein gone, but he wanted him gone quickly. Anything else — a war that dragged on — could cause lots of trouble. Television pictures of dead Iraqi civilians, the destruction of Baghdad, the natural desire to root for the underdog, and the already virulent hatred of the United States might prompt the storied “Arab street” to rise and threaten moderate regimes throughout the region.

I know, we’ve heard that before. But “before” was before the United States was so universally reviled as the protector of not only Israel but also the regimes hated by Islamic militants — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states. Even Turkey has turned out to be a dicey proposition. Public sentiment ran so strongly against the United States that Ankara decided to mostly sit out this war. It has cost us dearly.

Right now, assurances that pro-American regimes in the Muslim world will weather the current trouble sound uncomfortably similar to assurances that Hussein’s regime would instantaneously collapse and “Welcome, Yanks” banners would flap from every window in Iraq. The longer the war goes on — the more Fridays anti-American mullahs sermonize at their mosques — the greater the danger to pro-American regimes. The fact remains that moderate Arab and Islamic leaders are now scared. They fear their own people.

So if, as Don Rumsfeld and others say, the U.S. effort remains on schedule, then the question is why was this the schedule in the first place? In other words, wouldn’t it have been better to keep the diplomatic effort going — the additional month asked for by the six swing votes on the Security Council — so when war came, it came swiftly? An additional month would have meant that all U.S. forces would have been in the region, ready to go. As it is, the 4th Infantry Division still is not in place.

The answer is that the Bush administration really believed that the war would be brief — that “shock and awe” would work, that southern Iraq would rebel, and that some clear-thinking person close to Saddam would “exile” him with a bullet.

None of that has happened … yet. Maybe that’s because Iraqis are afraid of the goons in their midst, maybe they are waiting to see the outcome of the war, or maybe — just maybe — they hate the United States as much as they do Saddam but fear him more. Even after the U.S.-led coalition wins — and it will surely win — what has happened so far suggests that keeping the peace is going to be more difficult than expected. It just could be that administering Iraq after the war is going to be as expensive and dirty as some recently rebuked Pentagon planners have suggested.

Lyndon Johnson’s credibility gap turned out to be a mortal wound. He became such a polarizing figure that he limited himself to one elected presidential term. It is too soon to say that Bush is Johnson redux. Certainly the war in Iraq is nothing like the war in Vietnam. But what the two wars are beginning to have in common is a bristling arrogance coupled with an insistence that everything is going according to plan.

There’s almost certainly light at the end of this tunnel — but the tunnel is clearly longer than expected.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

By my count, eight Democratic members of the Senate have either run for president or are being mentioned (sometimes only by themselves) as candidates in 2004. Only one of them — Edward M. Kennedy — voted against the congressional resolution authorizing war with Iraq. Yet to hear some people tell it, it is Kennedy’s one vote that represents the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.

What party are they talking about? It cannot be the party of politicians who have made it their business to attract voters outside of some small, safe district — as with House members.

It cannot be the party that won the popular vote for the presidency in 2000 and for the previous eight years controlled the White House. It is, instead, a party that has panicked over the recent midterm elections and appears intent on beating a retreat — all the way back to the comfy days of the New Deal.

What is the justification for such talk? It is this: A more pronounced, unalloyed, leftist message would have turned out the Democratic faithful. Maybe. But there is an even greater chance that such a message would have propelled even more conservatives and centrists to the polls. The results for the Democrats might have been the same or even worse — much worse, in my own humble estimation.

The response from the party’s left is to be expected — although it hardly makes any sense. In the first place, it would have been impossible to take a hard antiwar position when, among others, such former and potentially future presidential candidates as Senators Joe Biden, John Edwards, Tom Harkin, Fritz Hollings, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and, yes, Hillary Clinton voted the other way. Over in the House, another potential presidential candidate, Dick Gephardt, took the same position. As for Al Gore, he questioned Bush’s timing, not his reasoning.

What the Democrats should have done was embrace the war on terrorism and make it a nonissue. Then the party should have moved on and raised economic issues — everything from the sick economy to corporate malfeasance to privatizing Social Security at a time when 401(k) accounts are shrinking before the eyes of the American investor.

As for the homeland security bill, Democrats should have forcefully made the case that antiterrorism has nothing to do with the unionization rights of federal workers.

The failure of the Democratic Party to nationalize the campaign and to field a spokesman with a taste for battle might have saved one, maybe two, Democratic seats — Carnahan in Missouri for sure, maybe Shaheen in New Hampshire.

The Democrats sorely lacked two things — their own issues and someone to advance them. That does not add up to an ideological drubbing but rather to missed opportunities. Last week’s results do not mean that, suddenly, the country wants right-wing judges, privatized Social Security, government support of organized religion, or, for that matter, a foreign policy with a chip on its shoulder just spoiling for a fight.

For some reason, the media loathes saying “no big deal.” Just as everything at CNN gets hyped as “breaking news,” so every election is a “historic” ideological realignment which will change the country forever (or maybe until the next election) and even alter the course of El Nino. This election was nothing of the sort, and it would be folly for the Democratic Party to think what the voters were really missing was a starker alternative.

November 5th was a triumph for George Bush and Karl Rove and a clear defeat for the Democrats. But the GOP won with money and tactics — a great get-out-the-vote effort and, yes, the lift provided by Bush’s personal popularity. The victory, though, was no knockout — just a match won on points. For the Democrats, there’s no reason to act woozy and stumble to the left. The party has been in that corner before. It’s where it usually loses.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His work frequently appears in the Flyer.

I love Hank McNamara. It’s true I don’t actually know him, but I have seen him frequently. I try not to notice that he never looks anyone in the eye, and for some strange reason, while everyone else is in color, he’s in black-and-white — a kind of pasty, shifty gray. What’s more, he’s a used-car dealer — undoubtedly selling clunkers to widows, orphans, and dotcom-ers down on their luck. Still, he’s my guy.

As you might have guessed, what I know about McNamara comes almost entirely from television and radio commercials mounted by his opponent for Bergen County (New Jersey) executive, someone named Dennis McNerney. The radio ad features the voice of a woman who is irate at the car McNamara is trying to sell her. This is the level of discourse that is now the norm in American politics.

Frankly, (my dear), I don’t care who will be the next Bergen County executive, since I don’t live there. I cite the ad only because it encapsulates much of what American politics has become and why I, for one, am just fed up. This week, my vote was cast on the basis of negative advertising. I was determined to punish anyone who insults my intelligence. If I could, I would have voted for McNamara.

It’s not true that politicians all lie or that they are all corrupt — I’ll stand them up against businessmen any day — but it is true that they have come to accept a system that is often dishonest. The negative spot, the attack ad, has its place — sometimes, the other guy is a stinker — but it has come to dominate American politics. It is almost always a lie.

In South Dakota, Republican Senate candidate John Thune aired an ad that somehow linked Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda, and the “enemies of America” to his opponent’s vote against a missile-defense system. In Georgia, Republican Senate candidate Saxby Chambliss broadcast a commercial that featured Osama bin Laden and the ever-popular Saddam and questioned his opponent’s “courage to lead.” The issue was President Bush’s homeland-security proposal. The opponent was Sen. Max Cleland. He lost three limbs — both legs and an arm — in Vietnam.

Where is the outrage? Where are the national politicians who are willing to stand up and actually denounce these ads? Where are the Republican and Democratic chairmen who are willing to take a stand against the degradation of American politics?

The thinking in Washington and elsewhere is that these ads are disconnected from politics as practiced the rest of the year or from government in general. That, though, is not the case. The same people who get elected based on lies, exaggerations, half-truths, negative attacks, and the like are hardly likely to slip into a new ethical mode once they start to govern. If they have sold out during the campaign — signed off on some scurrilous ad — we can hardly be surprised if they sell out while in office. Virginity is not retroactive.

When John McCain ran for the Republican presidential nomination, I was one of the journalists accused of going just plain goopy over him. Maybe I did. But here was a man who actually talked to the voters as if they were not dopes. Here was a man who said what he thought — who didn’t begin every sentence with the cop-out phrase “I don’t think the American people want …”

McCain was such a breath of fresh air, so downright candid and accessible, that it almost didn’t matter to me that I disagreed with him on almost every issue of substance. What mattered more, what mattered most, was that on the single most important issue — restoring trust in the political system — he was head and shoulders above everyone else.

So this week, if I could have, I’d have voted for everyone who was targeted by an intellectually dishonest attack ad. It’s personal. After all, the insult to their character was nothing compared to the insult to our own intelligence.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His work frequently appears in the Flyer.

The smug spirit of Enron pervades the Bush administration. When it learned that North Korea had a secret nuclear-arms program, it moved the disclosure off the books, lest it complicate the confrontation with Iraq. The information that Congress needed as it held another one of its self-proclaimed “historic” debates was withheld — a footnote known to only a few key members who, as did Enron’s board, passively kept their mouths shut.

But Japan knew. President Bush personally told Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on September 12th of this year. It was the same day that Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly, providing the clearest rationale yet for going to war with Iraq. He said nothing in that speech about North Korea. Unlike Iraq, it is not plodding toward producing nuclear weapons. It may already have at least two.

Undoubtedly, other governments also knew that North Korea was cheating on the agreement it had reached in 1994 with the Clinton administration. It was supposed to abandon its nuclear-weapons program — which, in a way, it did. But it started up another one, and this is the one that Washington started to substantiate last summer. Washington and Pyongyang had at least one thing in common: They were both keeping a secret from the American people.

In too many respects, the Bush administration operates as if it — and not Congress or, for that matter, the American people — owns this entity called the “government.” It has told Congress to buzz off when it asked for documents telling who Vice President Cheney met with in formulating the administration’s energy policy. Enron, perhaps?

It has been downright uncooperative in granting Freedom of Information requests from the news media and other interested parties. It fought a proposal to create an independent commission to investigate what went wrong before September 11th then reluctantly agreed to one and now has reneged on that agreement. The intelligence community, it seems, did just a swell job — the hole in lower Manhattan notwithstanding.

The news that North Korea was developing nuclear weapons — that it just might already have them — might not have changed the course of the Iraq debate in Congress one bit. It does not change my mind. In fact, it confronts us with what might happen when a desperate, despotic power gets its hands on such weapons. The South Korean capital of Seoul is just 40 miles from the North Korean border. If North Korea really has a nuclear arsenal, not to mention the means to deliver it, war may well be unthinkable.

The North Korean program certainly complicates matters — maybe in ways that I cannot envision. This is the virtue of debate: the teasing out of facts, arguments, positions that may have never occurred to you.

An important piece of information was withheld from me, from you, and our representatives in Congress. I am reminded of the so-called secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Secret to whom? Not the Cambodians. They surely noticed they were being bombed. Not the North Vietnamese. They knew too. The ones in the dark were the American people.

Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice deny that news about the North Korean program was withheld for political reasons. Bush needed time to study the matter, they insist. But he had plenty of time, and some of that time, Congress was engaged in the Iraq debate, playing the role of the oblivious board of directors. Bush is not that slow a learner. In fact, it was he — remember? — who included North Korea in his “axis of evil.” What did he know then?

It would be one thing if this were an isolated example of the Bush administration either exaggerating threats — the imminence of an Iraqi bomb, for instance — or forgetting to mention one that already exists, such as the North Korea program. But this administration keeps one set of books for itself and another for the public and Congress. It’s Enron on the Potomac.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His work frequently appears in the Flyer.

If, as Plato said, the unexamined life is not worth living, then Al Gore has led one hell of a life. The once and probably future presidential candidate is retooling himself yet again. Last time, he ran as a political mannequin, draped and dressed by this or that consultant, handler, pollster, or color-coordinator — earth tones preferred. This time, he will run as himself — if only, I am obliged to add, he knows who that is.

Once upon a time, that was no mystery. Gore was the congressman and then senator from Tennessee, renowned for his thoughtfulness and his willingness to break the spine of a book and simply ingest it. He wrote books himself, did his own thinking, and made himself master of many subjects, notably the environment and arms control. He became the very model of a United States senator.

Yet that Al Gore was not a natural politician. Something about him — his body language and the appearance that he was lip-synching his own voice — made him a bad presidential candidate the first time out. That was 1988, when he proved himself not ready for prime time.

Trouble was, he repeated his performance in 2000. He kicked away a victory that should have been his. For all of Bill Clinton’s troubles, he gave Gore a pretty good platform to run on — peace, prosperity, and a unified Democratic Party. Still, George W. Bush won the presidency. It was a close race, and Gore won the popular vote, but it says something about both Bush and Gore that most people preferred to move on with Bush than to stick and fight it out for Gore.

Now, Gore promises to reinvent himself once again. “If I had to do it all over again, I’d just let it rip,” he told a breakfast meeting of supporters in Memphis the other day. “To hell with the polls, the tactics, and the rest. I would have poured out my heart and my vision for America’s future.” In other words, the New Al Gore is going back to the Old Al Gore.

Welcome back, I am tempted to say. That Al Gore did indeed have vision and heart. He was a decent man, a thoughtful man, and he had — although he kept it a secret — a winning sense of humor.

Al Gore will never be George Bush. The president is famously comfortable in his own skin — but more and more, I am not. Bush may have felt terrific about his $1.4 trillion tax cut, but it has contributed mightily to the federal deficit and left the government scraping the bottom of the barrel for cash.

Bush may feel terrific about his new foreign policy doctrine — the best defense is a good offense — but it raises more questions than it answers: What happens after Saddam Hussein (or Iraq) is taken out?

Bush has settled into a morally comfy antipathy toward Yasir Arafat — he’s off the Christmas card list — but the president’s spokesmen simply cannot explain what happens if, as expected, the Palestinians reelect Arafat. (Maybe, as with Florida, the Supreme Court will change the results.)

Gore might well have reached some of the same decisions — although not on taxes, that’s for sure. He was one of the few Democrats to vociferously support the Gulf War, and he apparently has few quibbles with Bush’s Iraq policy. But he would have thought out — and could explain — what happens afterward.

Gore, however, is too preoccupied with Gore. He introspects too much, tinkering with what, by now, ought to be a finished product.

Get on with it, Al. Get out on the stump, stop telling us who you are, and start showing us. Maybe the unexamined life is not worth living, but please — at long last — leave the examining to us.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

Vanderbilt University wants a few good men — preferably Jewish men (or women).

The Nashville school, determined to lift its academic standing, thinks that enticing Jews to its campus is a way to do it. It’s not the only school doing that. Texas Christian University, for one, offers merit scholarships specifically for Jewish students. You read that right: Texas Christian.

At these colleges and others, Jews are valued for what sounds like a stereotype — that Jews are smarter, for instance. Yet the numbers proclaim something like that to be the case. On the recent College Boards, Jews averaged 1161. Unitarians did somewhat better (1209), but the national average was 1020. At the elite Ivy League schools, Jews make up 23 percent of the student body. They are a measly 2 percent of the U.S. population.

“Jewish students, by culture and by ability and by the very nature of their liveliness, make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life,” Vanderbilt’s chancellor, Gordon Gee, told The Wall Street Journal. The very nature of their liveliness? Is this man out of his mind?

Actually, no. Gee is speaking both a specific truth and a larger truth: Not all groups are the same. This, I confess, is why I seized on the Vanderbilt story. For too long in this country, we have been determined not to notice what, literally, is sometimes in our faces: Groups, cultures, call them what you want, have different behavioral characteristics. I don’t know if Jews are smarter than other people, but I do know they do better than other groups on the College Boards. That makes them different.

Normally, though, tons of epithets would fall upon the poor head of anyone who would cite such differences. We go so far as to treat all airline passengers as equal security risks, defying what we know about the real risk. This is done in the name of some sort of equality — our national ethic that we are all the same.

So everyone is subjected to the possibility of a thorough stop and search. The individual whom Donald J. Carty, the CEO of American Airlines, called “Aunt Molly in Iowa” gets the same attention as someone who by virtue of age, sex, and ethnicity is the more likely risk. In a recent speech, Carty called this practice “nuts.” He is right. Treating all passengers as equal security risks costs money, takes time — and makes us no safer. In fact, it probably squanders resources.

Sometimes, the government’s insistence on maintaining a false sameness borders on the comical. In March, The New York Times reported that a study of speeders on the New Jersey Turnpike concluded that where the speed limit was 65 mph, blacks sped more than whites. This could not be, the Justice Department said — and it buried the report. The Justice Department did not say why this could not be, it just knew that because all people are the same, they drive the same and speed the same — and, therefore, if blacks are stopped more than whites, it has to be on account of racial profiling.

There is such a thing as racial profiling based on little more than bigotry. That, though, is not the same as racial profiling based on real behavioral differences among groups.

Some Jews don’t like what Vanderbilt and other schools are doing. I can understand that. If you single out Jews for real characteristics, what stops you from singling them out for fictitious ones? The answer, I both think and hope, is that we are past that.

I would say something similar about other groups as well. Jim Crow is dead. Racism exists, but it is waning, a spent force. We must insist on equality before the law. But we must insist also that we are not all the same.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

Ray Krone owes his freedom to the simple fact that whoever killed Kim Ancona drooled on her.

Earlier this month, he became the 100th person freed from prison after having been on death row. He had already served 10 years before a DNA test proved that the saliva found on Ancona could not have been Krone’s. He was free to go on his merry way — and sorry about those 10 years, Ray.

What would have happened, you might wonder, had the actual killer just kept his mouth shut? If the wrong man is convicted, the wrong man can be executed.

This reality is totally lost on Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Although ostensibly a conservative and therefore determined to limit Washington’s reach, Ashcroft has slowly been nationalizing the death penalty. Time magazine tells us that 12 times since assuming office, Ashcroft has overruled local U.S. attorneys and demanded they ask for capital punishment.

Since Ashcroft supposedly does not read newspapers, I can say what I want about him without hurting his feelings. He’s thick. What do I mean by that? I mean he’s uneducable. I mean he knows of all the studies done about capital punishment, including the one recently issued in Illinois, yet his confidence in capital punishment remains unshaken. The Illinois study concluded, if I may paraphrase, that the only way to ensure that no innocent person is ever executed is either to be God or do away with capital punishment. Only one is an option.

Ashcroft is hearing none of this. He has, literally, a religious faith in capital punishment. When he was in the Senate, he blocked a judgeship because the nominee was sometimes soft on death. It wasn’t that the nominee was a foe of capital punishment. It was just that he did not take every opportunity to uphold a death sentence. People like that cannot be trusted.

Recently, Ashcroft announced the indictment of Darrell David Rice on four counts of murder, two for each of his alleged victims. Julianne Williams and Laura S. Winans were killed while camping in the Shenandoah National Park in 1996. Rice is currently in jail for another crime.

It is the government’s intention to prove that the crime for which Rice has been convicted — attempted abduction of a woman — and the one for which he has been charged are linked by motive: He hates women and homosexuals.

Maybe that’s the case, and maybe Rice’s alleged biases were a motive for the crime. But upon that “maybe” the government has constructed a capital case. After all, if it had hard evidence — DNA, etc. — it would not have waited until now to seek an indictment. Rice has been in jail since 1998. It seems instead that what the government lacks in evidence it will make up in motive.

If the government is going to buttress its case by showing Rice hated women and homosexuals, it’s going to have to resort to what witnesses say he said or — maybe — to the testimony of a jailhouse snitch. This is precisely the sort of evidence that eventually figures in the release of innocent people from death row. With Rice, though, DNA can never free him, because there is no DNA to begin with. Maybe he’s guilty. But with the death penalty, why take the chance?

One hundred men, once on death row and now free, can testify to the fact that the system is far from perfect. Another attorney general might pause and wonder about what this all means. Ashcroft does not pause at all. He thinks he is doing God’s perfect work, but he is doing it, as we all must, as an imperfect man. He can be forgiven his mistakes. He cannot be forgiven his arrogance.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

If I weren’t a Jew, I might be called an anti-Semite. I have occasionally been critical of Israel. I have occasionally taken the Palestinians’ side. I have always maintained that the occupation of the West Bank is wrong, and while I am, to my marrow, a supporter of Israel, I insist that the Palestinian cause — although sullied by terrorism — is a worthy one.

In Israel itself, these positions would hardly be considered remarkable. People with similar views serve in Parliament. They write columns for the newspapers. And while they are sometimes vehemently criticized — such is the rambunctious nature of Israel’s democratic din — they are not called either anti-Semites or self-hating Jews.

I cannot say the same about America. Here, criticism of Israel, particularly anti-Zionism, is equated with anti-Semitism.

Few people have written more often about Arab anti-Semitism than me. I have come at this subject time and time again, so often that I have feared becoming a bore. Arab anti-Semitism not only exists, it is often either state-sponsored or state-condoned, and it is only getting worse.

But that hardly means that anti-Zionism — hating, opposing, fighting Israel — is the same as anti-Semitism, hating Jews anywhere on account of supposedly inherent characteristics. If I were a Palestinian living in a refugee camp, I might very well hate Israel for my plight — never mind its actual cause — and I even might not like Jews in general.

After all, Israel proclaims itself the Jewish state. It officially celebrates Jewish holidays, including the Sabbath on Saturday. It allows the orthodox rabbinate to control secular matters, such as marriage, and, of course, it offers citizenship to any person who can reasonably claim to be Jewish. This so-called right of return permits such a person to “return” to a place where he or she has never been. Palestinians must find this simply astonishing.

To equate anti-Zionists or critics of Israel in general with anti-Semites is to liken them to the Nazis or the rampaging mobs of the pogroms. It says that their hatred is unreasonable, unfathomable, based on some crackpot racial theory or some misguided religious zealotry. It dismisses all criticism, no matter how legitimate, as rooted in prejudice and therefore without any validity.

When Israel recently jailed and then deported four pro-Palestinian Swedes, two of whom are physicians, under the misguided policy of seeing all Palestinian sympathizers as enemies of the state, that is an action that ought to be condemned — and the Swedes who have done so ought not be considered anti-Semites. A column by Gideon Levy made the point that Israel cannot reject and rebut all criticism by reciting the mantra “The whole world is against us.”

The same holds for American Jews. To turn a deaf ear to the demands of Palestinians, to dehumanize them all as bigots, only exacerbates the hatred on both sides. The Palestinians do have a case. Their methods are sometimes — maybe often — execrable, but that does not change the fact that they are a people without a state. As long as that persists, so too will their struggle.

The only way out of the current mess is for each side to listen to what the other is saying. To protest living conditions on the West Bank is not anti-Semitism. To condemn the increasing encroachment of Jewish settlements is not anti-Semitism. To protest the cuffing that the Israelis sometimes give the international press is not anti-Semitism either.

To suggest, finally, that Ariel Sharon is a rejectionist who provocatively egged on the Palestinians is not anti-Semitism. It is a criticism no more steeped in bigotry than the assertion that Yasir Arafat is a liar who cannot be trusted. That does not make me anti-Arab — just a realist who is sick and tired of lazy labels.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

Reading the morning papers, I start humming the old Irving Berlin tune “Harlem On My Mind.” I do so because Harlem is where Bill Clinton hangs out when he’s in New York and doing the hard work of doing nothing much. I envision him reading the papers as I do and smiling: See? I wasn’t so bad after all.

Buried under the headlines and between the lines is the rueful confession of the Bush administration that maybe — just maybe — Clinton was doing the right thing in the Middle East. He kept everyone talking.

George Bush was going to have none of that. His policy when it came to the Arab-Israeli mess was essentially to be the anti-Clinton. There would be no meetings at Camp David, the Wye Plantation, or some obscure air base. In fact, those meetings had done nothing but encourage the Palestinians to think that the pursuit of terrorism was the way to go. This thinking was contained in the Fleischer Doctrine.

Ari Fleischer is the president’s press secretary and not the sort, on his own, to make policy, not to mention a whole doctrine. But on the last day of February, Fleischer told the press that the Clinton administration’s insistence on taking such a large role in the Middle East was counterproductive.

“Actually, I think if you go back to when the violence began, you can make the case that in an attempt to shoot the moon and get nothing, more violence resulted,” he said. This was because the Clinton administration had so raised expectations “that it turned into violence.” By the afternoon, Fleischer had e-mailed a retraction. “No United States president, including Bill Clinton, is to blame for violence in the Middle East.”

Excuse me for believing that Fleischer was merely repeating water-cooler wisdom in the West Wing. This, clearly, is what the Bushies believed. The proof of that is their absolute refusal-cum-reluctance to even approximate Clinton’s involvement in the Middle East. Gen. Anthony Zinni was dispatched to the region, but he is 1) retired and 2) obscure.

In truth, no one can say what would have happened had the Bush administration followed the Clinton pattern of engagement. The Arab-Israeli dispute is complicated, intensely emotional, and downright durable. It’s possible that Clinton did indeed get too engaged and was in too much of a hurry to add a Nobel Peace Prize to his honors. It’s possible, maybe even probable, that Arafat was never going to accept any deal. His idea of a compromise is the whole ball of wax.

But it is the job, the obligation, and the duty of any American administration to do the hard, often fruitless work of the Middle East. It is the responsibility of any White House to keep the secretary of state frequently in the region, if only to keep the two sides from tearing each other apart. This is particularly true at the moment, because, as Yeats would have it, the center has not held. Foggy Bottom is the only center left.

It has taken the campaign against Iraq to get Dick Cheney on his airplane. As he has found out, though, the states of the region have a hard time supporting a war against a fellow Arab country when it is Israel that so preoccupies the minds of their people. First things first, they say. It could be that the administration finally is listening.

If so, it is high time Washington signaled that it is raising its commitment and profile in the Middle East — and keeping it there for the long run. Otherwise, the broad alliance against Iraq will consist of maybe Britain, while the current mess in the Middle East — atrocity after atrocity — will continue. Maybe the Bushies ought to appoint a more high-powered, more experienced Middle East negotiator. I know. It’ll never happen, but I can’t help myself.

I’ve got Harlem on my mind.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His work frequently appears in the Flyer.

Ah, Co-hane,” the PLO official said, examining my passport and pronouncing my name in the Hebrew manner. This was Beirut in the 1980s, during the civil war, and I was asking permission to visit the PLO-controlled refugee camps in the south of Lebanon.

“Co-hane,” the official repeated. I held my breath. Finally, he looked up. “You are most welcome,” he said. The “issue” was never again mentioned.

But the issue was most certainly raised with Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. We may never know precisely why Pearl was snatched and killed — whether it was because he was a Westerner, an American, a reporter, a Jew, or some combination thereof. But until we know better, we must take his killers at their word. Pearl was kidnapped because he was “anti-Islam and a Jew.” So said Fahad Naseem, a suspect in the case.

Nothing I know about Pearl suggests he was anti-Islam. But he was most definitely a Jew. According to those who have seen the videotape that the killers made of what apparently were Pearl’s last moments, he was forced to say, “I am a Jew. My mother is a Jew.”

Well, so is mine. And I am an American and a journalist as well, so you can understand why I am consumed with anger and sadness at the death of this young man whose widow is carrying his child.

But I don’t think I am being irrational when I say that the hideous murder of Daniel Pearl was not just the work of “barbarians” — the phrase du jour to describe his killers–but the inevitable result of policy. Throughout the once-tolerant Islamic world, anti-Semitism — hatred of Jews — has become both common and acceptable.

To some, this will seem unsurprising. After all, there is a connection between Judaism and Zionism. But while most Zionists are Jews, not all Jews are Zionists — and even those who are pro-Israel are not the subhuman caricatures of the Islamic world’s anti-Semitic media. This caricature — devious, diabolical, intent on world domination, and in total control of the world’s financial system — appears so often in the Islamic world’s press that it can and maybe was used to justify the murder of a totally innocent man.

The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan ran a two-part series back in December headlined “The Jewish Sense of Superiority in the World.” It revealed, as anti-Semites have over and over again, the secret plans of the Jews to “implement their strategic hellish plans to take over the world.”

Just precisely how these all-powerful and devilishly clever people were somehow nearly exterminated during the Nazi era might present something of a problem to anti-Semites. Not to worry: The Holocaust never happened. Last year, for instance, the often-lauded Qatar television channel Al-Jazeera held a panel discussion entitled “Is Zionism worse than Nazism?” Some prominent Holocaust deniers were allowed to participate. Of course, both sides of the question were presented.

Just six days after September 11th, President Bush went to Washington’s Islamic Center to send a message: “Islam is peace.” He distinguished between the perverted and perfidious religious zealotry of Osama bin Laden and mainstream Islam. “The face of terror is not the true face of Islam,” the president said.

The decency, the guts, to make a similar repudiation of bigotry is precisely what is lacking in most Islamic or Arab leaders. Neither the Saudi nor the Egyptian regimes slap down their local anti-Semites, and neither, of course, does Yasser Arafat, whose own organization has trafficked in vile stereotypes of the sort once used by the Nazis.

It could be that Daniel Pearl would have been killed no matter what. It could be that it was enough that he was American. But it was not his nationality that seemed to matter to his captors. It was his religion. Anti-Semitic kidnappers killed Pearl. Cowardly governments enabled it to happen.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His work frequently appers in the Flyer.