PEACE DOESN'T COME FROM A 'PROCESS'

From Colombia to Palestine, the Clinton era of appeasement is over.

As the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia fled the country's
"demilitarized" zone over the weekend, they left behind terror training
camps worthy of al Qaeda. Advancing soldiers and reporters found
instructions on how to down aircraft, threats against "gringos," libraries
of Marxist theory, and even a printed Web page from the American Embassy in
Bogota. The U.S., it said, will not make concessions to kidnappers and will
help its allies fight terrorism.

Let's hope so, and let's not repeat past mistakes.

For Colombia's peace process was based on an idea so stupid that it could
only have been the culmination of a U.S.-led decade of appeasement that saw
terrorists installed in the governments of Palestine, Northern Ireland and
Sierra Leone, and butchers like Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Kim
Jong Il using negotiations as cover for the pursuit of aggressive aims.

In Colombia, President Andres Pastrana decided three years ago that giving
the terror group, which goes by the Spanish acronym FARC, license to rule
in a safe haven the size of Switzerland would somehow persuade it to give
up its decades-long struggle to replace the democratic government with a
Marxist dictatorship. He was apparently surprised that this gesture only
whetted the FARC's appetite for more--surprised that it terrorized the
local population and conscripted local youth, surprised that it turned to
narcotrafficking to finance its war, surprised it used the area as a base
from which to attack the rest of the country, and surprised that Colombians
formed self-defense groups when their government declined to protect them.
Surprised above all that after committing to work toward a cease-fire, the
FARC killed about 120 people, sabotaged a dam and hijacked airplanes.

At least Mr. Pastrana's decided enough's enough.

But the FARC now melts back into the countryside numerically stronger and
richer than ever, and holding about 800 hostages--including a Colombian
senator and one of the candidates vying for the president's job.

In this case, thankfully, there were no Clinton photo-ops to tie the U.S.
directly to the fiasco.

But we have hardly been helpful.

Thanks to congressional Democrats, the government has been prohibited from
helping Colombia in its fight against terrorism due to often dubious
allegations of human rights abuses by the military.

President Bush, whose cabinet discussed the matter this week, surely
understands now that such a fight will never be squeaky clean.

If the U.S. doesn't want a terrorist international located in South
America, it needs to get serious about helping Colombia defeat the FARC.
Last August, three bomb specialists from the Irish Republican Army were
caught training the group.

The instinct to appease terrorists and belligerent states is hardly a new
one. But it was never the consistent theme of American foreign policy until
the 1990s, when President Clinton committed the U.S. to Shimon Peres's
vision of a "New Middle East" and to delivering Northern Ireland's
Catholics from the the oppression of one of the world's oldest democracies.
The few who pointed out the risks of effectively legitimizing decades of
murder by bringing groups like the PLO and the IRA into government were
largely written off as enemies of peace.

But in Israel, at least, the "enemies" could not have been proved more
right. After a year and a half of low-intensity war, most rational
observers understand that Yasser Arafat is the biggest obstacle to the
creation of a viable Palestinian state and a just settlement of the
conflict. And in Northern Ireland, the freeing of hundreds of killers
("political prisoners") from jail and the de facto destruction of the Royal
Ulster Constabulary have only exacerbated sectarian divisions and
undermined faith in the rule of law. Government policy is seen to be for
sale to whoever causes it the most trouble.

The IRA is still sitting on tons of armaments it received from Moammar
Gadhafi in the 1980s, which will surely be deployed by some so-called
splinter group whenever concessions from the British government stop.

For sheer lunacy, however, no "peace process" can match the one we imposed
on Sierra Leone in 1999 after its elected government had captured rebel
leader Foday Sankoh and was finishing off the civil war. President Clinton
and his Africa envoy, Jesse Jackson, not only persuaded the government to
release Sankoh but to make him vice president and put him in charge of the
country's diamond mines.

Within a year Sankoh was back to hacking off limbs and was even selling
cut-price diamonds to al Qaeda. He succeeded in taking 500 U.N.
peacekeepers hostage before being captured again.

Do the world's thugs take notice of whether civilized nations respond to
violence with the carrot, the stick or simple fear? You bet. Exhibit A is
Osama bin Laden himself, who has said repeatedly that the U.S. decision to
flee Somalia after the loss of 18 soldiers in 1993 is one of the main
reasons he believes he can change U.S. policy through terror.

But perhaps no one has put it more bluntly than Leila Khaled, one of the
Palestinian terrorists who hijacked five planes (four successfully) over
the course of two days in September 1970, and then used the passengers to
win the release of PLO terrorists from European jails. Though the operation
led to the bloody expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, she maintains to this
day that it was a great success because it showed "that governments could
be negotiated with and that we could impose our demands. . . . [That] gave
us the courage and the confidence to go ahead with our struggle."

One of the few recent governments to resist the lure of negotiations was
Turkey's. Faced with a seemingly intractable guerrilla war led by the
Damascus-based Abdullah Ocalan and his Kurdistan Workers Party, known as
the PKK, the Turks decided in 1998 simply to mass their troops on the
Syrian border and demand that Ocalan be expelled--or else. He was, and was
soon captured.

One lesson was that terrorists don't last long without state sponsorship.
Another was that it's simply not true that new terrorists will always
replace the old until the grievance at hand is addressed.

Deprived of its charismatic leader, the PKK has appeared simply to fade away.

In short, while history affords numerous examples of force successfully
solving the problem of terrorists, rebels or rogue states, there are
scarcely any examples of agreements with undefeated belligerents that stand
the test of time. Even in cases where there are legitimate complaints of
injustice--say the Israeli occupation of the West Bank--governments would
be best advised not to negotiate under fire. Saudi Arabia's latest proposal
to normalize Arab relations with Israel, even were it sincere, would amount
to just one more tenuous deal reached at gunpoint.

The collapse of Colombia's peace process, therefore, is not a setback but
an opportunity. Terrorists do respond to incentives. And if the world's
governments can not only say that they don't negotiate, but also appear to
mean it, they should have less to fear in the future. No more peace
processes, please.