So Who’s Laughing Now? : * Hard-Liners Win, Peace Loses With Bush’s Unavoidable PLO Call

Only the hard-liners in the Middle East can be happy right now. No doubt President Bush’s decision to suspend talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization fills many of them with the wicked glee that comes from observing mindless destruction.

It’s true that the limp peace process orchestrated by Washington wasn’t getting far: 18 months of desultory chats, mainly for show, between the American ambassador in Tunis and a PLO representative, combined with bitter wrangling between Washington and Jerusalem and unapologetic foot-dragging from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

But now the risk is that the tension will intensify and the region will slide toward war. This is why low-level talks with the PLO were better than no talks at all.

But when PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat could not bring himself to repudiate the unsuccessful terrorist raid on an Israeli beach last month, engineered by poisonous anti-American PLO hard-liners, President Bush made the inescapable call--while couching it in the least dire terms. By selecting suspension rather than flat cancellation he pointedly left open to Arafat the option of condemning the raid and disciplining the PLO perpetrators within his own executive council in order to re-start talks with Washington.

The Palestinians have from the Bush Administration a serious commitment to a peace process in which they would be wholly included, and in which the Israelis would not be permitted to call every major shot. Arafat & Co. are not likely to get a better deck of cards to play with from Washington than they are getting from Bush and his secretary of state.

Turning now against PLO Executive Committee member and terrorist Abul Abbas will not be easy for Arafat and his allies. But this is the only way out of the corner that the PLO painted itself into when it originally agreed to talks on condition that it renounce terrorism--and 18 months later failed to deliver on its part of the deal.