A Hope For Peace

IT'S TEMPTING to accept President Nixon's comparison of last week's world-wide alert of American military forces with "the Cuban confrontation of 1962." Like the Cuban missile crisis, last week's little Russian-American contretemps may have been blown up out of all relation to reality by a combination of Cold Warriors, military people and veteran politicians like Senator Jackson and Nixon himself.

This view is lent plausibility by the lack of evidence of Russian belligerency and above all by the frequency with which Nixon has distorted the truth and lied outright in the past. These deceptions range from his tales of respect for Cambodian neutrality when his bombers had been killing Cambodians for two years to his misrepresentations of Elliot Richardson's and Thomas Jefferson's political positions during his press conference last week. Henry Kissinger is of course correct in saying that questions about the motives behind the alert are symptomatic of what's happening to the United States; but it is the president, not the press, who has created the disease.

Whatever we may think of last week's alert, the Middle East cease-fire is a great achievement--especially if it holds up. For the moment, at least, no one is being killed in the Middle East, and Egypt and Israel have agreed to take steps towards negotiating a real agreement. Hopefully, such an agreement will guarantee the national and personal security of people of all backgrounds and religions, and allow them to co-operate in building a Middle East of peace and freedom. For this to happen, all the parties to the conflict--Israel, the Arab states, and the Palestinian refugees--will have to take part in negotiations in a spirit of concession and good will; though this is hard to imagine, it's surely not impossible, and the remaining belligerent factions should move to join negotiations. In the meantime, all countries should scrupulously respect the ceasefire.