Triple Threat To Peace -- Arafat, Sharon And Bush

It's a depressing world these days.

Overseas, we have Americans fighting wars in so many places our government doesn't even tell us about them all. In the Middle East, we have the well-equipped and well-trained Israeli army smashing the ragtag Palestinians, who retaliate with suicide bombers who destroy the lives of innocent people going about their daily business. And in the Bay Area, we have a rash of suicide fathers and mothers, who obliterate their families before killing themselves.

In Washington, we have a somnolent president who still can't believe how easily he went from barroom drunk to Leader of the Free World. It occurred to him Thursday that perhaps he ought to take the Israeli-Palestinian crisis seriously, so he's finally (and far too late) dispatching the one reasonable man he knows to try to get people to talk to one another.

Colin Powell will not succeed. It's far too late for that. If there was any hope for a peaceful resolution to the Middle East crisis, it rested on the shoulders of an ex-president, one William Jefferson Clinton, but George W. Bush has too stingy an outlook on life to even consider using Clinton's skills as negotiator.

(An Israeli once told me: "In the Middle East, Clinton walks on water.")

Mr. Bush's petty mind is now setting us up for a war with Iraq, a war that will cost thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives. And what will be the purpose of that war? To kill Saddam Hussein, not because Saddam is a bad man (which he is), but to impress his father, the bumbling president who bungled us into our first Gulf War.

Of course, you and I will be told that our sons and daughters will be fighting in Iraq because Saddam has suddenly unlocked the secrets of weapons of mass destruction and is about to blackmail the world.