Alas, when the secretary of state counsels an ally to not respond to an assault like the bombing in Israel, he is unthinkingly calling into question the validity of deterrence.
Powell is also doing inadvertent violence to the meaning of "restraint" as an approach to a horrendously difficult security problem. Israel already operates with restraint: An unrestrained Israel would have long since reoccupied the West Bank and Gaza in response to the uprising that began last September. Most other nations would have - and, tragically, the restraint Israel has shown thus far has only increased the danger to its own people.
Powell is, in essence, asking Israel to eschew a policy of deterrence in favor of something far more vague and, the evidence suggests, far more destabilizing. And herein lies the danger to the U.S.
Deterrence is not a risk-free policy. It requires the occasional spilling of blood in response to real-world events. It has required us to make some very difficult choices in the past half-century, both to glorious effect (the collapse of the Soviet Union) and tragic effect (the misguided war in Vietnam).
On balance, deterrence has been an astonishingly robust approach. But if we do not believe in it for other nations, how long can we continue to employ it ourselves? Can we really preach one doctrine to other countries while embracing another for the United States alone?
There have always been utopians here and abroad who find deterrence a discomfiting approach and are constantly seeking to replace it with a more touchy-feely and pacifistic foreign policy. They have had their way with Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, to disastrous effect.
It can happen here, too, with similarly disastrous results - and Colin Powell is undermining the argument against the enemies of deterrence by opposing its utility in Israel.
That's more terrifying than any single terrorist attack, because it invites the possibility of an untold number more.
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