Colin Powell is back from his mission to the Middle-East, and the pundits are nonplussed, a terrible state to be in if you are a pundit. Pundits, who are supposed to be keen on finding the hidden truth of official news releases, are finding this time so many conflicting truths that it does not make any sense. So, they fall back on the convenient notion that the administration’s Middle-East policy is "incoherent," and hint that the president is out of his league as regards imternational affairs—a shibboleth dear to Democrats and their soul mates in continental Europe. The situation is so bad that some pundits are suggesting Mr. Clinton or Mr. Carter as possible negotiators between Palestinians and Israelis. Of course, this is ludicrous since these two had their own opportunities to arrange for a durable peace in the region and failed.

By the Mudgeon axiom that there is only one truth, the pundits should be pilloried, and even exiled to Paris, France, just so they can see life-size incoherence up close. It so happens that President Bush is just using diplomacy, which very few pundits understand. When confronted with insoluble problems, diplomacy naturally retreats into deceit and political fog. To illustrate this proposition, a look at recent history is suitably instructive. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the war in Vietnam, at the time was called a diplomatic feat. Its negotiators, Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger, shared a Nobel Peace Prize for it. Here, we called Henry a brilliant diplomat for having transacted "a peace with honor." Of course, this did not at all reflect any reality, as North Vietnam violated the treaty as soon as it was signed, and in big ways. The whole affair was a matter of deceit and fog, for there was no peace—only a brutal invasion of South Vietnam—and no honor—remember the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon. The problem was insoluble, because we wanted to end the war and could not at the same time defeat the North Vietnamese. Another illustration is the Munich treaty of 1938 signed by Hitler, Chamberlain, and Daladier, which was acclaimed at the time as a diplomatic tour de force in Britain and France for having avoided an armed conflict in Europe. It was all deceit and fog, because the problem of stopping Hitler without waging war was insoluble. The treaty did not achieve anything other than giving Hitler more time and resolve to solidify his war plans.

What did the president say that drove the pundits up the wall? Well, in succession, he repeatedly chastised Arafat for acts of terrorism and Sharon for his incursion into the West Bank, said he understood the motives of the Israeli raid, and commiserated with the Palestinians’ sorry circumstances. He then demanded a withdrawal of the Israeli troops, but did not act on Sharon’s foot dragging—what could be done anyway? Yet, he refused to call Mr. Arafat a terrorist, and sent Colin Powell to meet all parties to the conflict, including Arafat. Predictably, Powell’s mission achieved nothing. Critics took each of the president’s statements as supporting one side against the other, and declared his policy incoherent. They did not either considered that one could at the same time understand the Israelis’ motives and commiserate with the Palestinian populations, which after all does not violate logic.

Of course, they were wrong. They had forgotten an important item in a speech by the president concerning US relations with other nations in the wake of the September 11 attacks. In that speech, Mr. Bush asserted that it was more important to watch what people did than to listen to what they said, which made a great deal of sense. At the time, I thought that, if this was one of the president’s basic principles of government, it should surely apply to his own administration. So, any analyses regarding the administration’s position regarding the Middle-East situation should have concentrated not on what Mr. Bush said, but on what he did. He did nothing, which was the right thing to do in such circumstances. All those statements that got the pundits in a tizzy were just fog. In actuality, the president let the Israelis handle their predicament as they saw fit, probably supported it, and nothing was incoherent or ambiguous about it.

The success of Mr. Bush’s policy of doing nothing is measured by the results of the Israeli raid. Arafat, who either actively organized terrorist activities or was incapable of controlling them, was humiliated and isolated. Some of the terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank was destroyed, and a clear message was sent that Israel would respond to acts of war by war. This state of affairs may precipitate conditions favorable to solutions. One of them is the Saudi proposal, which is not anything new, but at least puts Saudi Arabia officially in the picture, its internal inconsistencies over the matter notwithstanding. Another is the psychological effect that visions of war have on international opinion. It is easy to gloss over suicide bombings as individual acts of despair and not collective acts of war. It is more difficult to pretend that tanks wreaking havoc in the streets of Ramallah is not war and a potential fuse for a conflict of worldwide consequences. In sum, the Middle-East problem has been put where it belongs, in the foreground of international concerns and with proper urgency. And yes, still pro forma, the Europeans applauded the Powell mission. So, who should complain?