The lead, front-page news article in today's New York Times reports, "Mr. Cheney's remarks about the importance of Mr. Arafat's role in Beirut came as the administration was struggling to rebuild the peace process."
The reference to "the peace process," as if it were some kind of corporeal entity that had something to do with peace, is classic Times-State Department-speak. The Times editors had cracked down for a while on the use of this phrase, recognizing it for what it was -- ideologically charged language that was out of touch with reality. "Peace" is something that it makes sense to talk about in a news article. "Negotiations" are another thing. But to call a process of Israeli concessions and Palestinian Arab terrorism that has led inexorably to more Palestinian Arab terrorism and demands for more Israeli concessions a "peace process" is a triumph of imagination over experience. As others have written, "war process" would be a more accurate term. The Bush administration is struggling to wrest more concessions out of Israel in the misguided belief that this will stop the terrorism. If the Bush administration took the same approach with Osama Bin Laden that it is suggesting Israel take with the Palestinian Arabs, it would involve offering the terrorist kingpin all of Washington and offering to withdraw American troops from bases around the world. It's unlikely that such a surrender would be described as a "peace process." When the Times describes what the administration is now doing as "struggling to rebuild the peace process," it is letting itself be spun by the State Department's spinners.