Spare some sympathy for Bill Graham, once a professor, now Minister of Foreign Affairs.

When George W. Bush revealed his “vision” for Mideast peace this week, which requires Palestinians to democratically elect someone the U.S. approves of, the Minister seemed to revert to his academic past. “Where I would differ, ” he said, “. . . and where I find an inconsistency, is the insistence that a democratic process be put in place, but then that democratic process will be predetermined.”

Inconsistency? Other leaders don’t seem to mind. But it’s the sort of thing that bothers ordinary people, out in real life, who can’t get away with it. Your family, friends or co-workers stop you. They roll their eyes or make sarcastic cracks.

Even Bill Graham overlooked some other inconsistencies, like the fact the President made no democracy demands on his Mideast allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia; or that he himself was elected without a majority.

The entire world of international politics is filled with these “inconsistencies”; it is pretty much equivalent to them. If people reacted to pronouncements on world affairs the way they do to friends and family, discussion would be crippled. Every sentence would be interrupted with an eye roll or a guffaw. Take a few more examples from the past week.

On Monday, The Globe and Mail’s Paul Adams wrote from the region, “Israel is digging in for an indefinite reoccupation of Palestinian cities and towns . . . in an effort to halt terrorist attacks.” Now that is clearly the motive Israel gives for its action, but Paul Adams presents it as a fact, like the reoccupation itself. It may seem a small point but you’d never let it slip by in private conversation, if you knew it was false. “So you claim,” you would say.

I’d argue the purpose of the reoccupation cannot be to halt terror, since it is guaranteed to lead to further terror, now or down the road. Take at random a report in Ha’aretz this week that three children in Jenin, aged six, six, and twelve, were killed by Israeli soldiers in a tank — two were riding their bikes and one on a shopping trip with her dad — when they thought the Israeli curfew had been lifted for a few hours.

It doesn’t matter a damn whether the army meant to kill these kids; the event creates future terrorists with certainty and the Ariel Sharon government must know it. Ergo they have another purpose, which is to serve their true policy objective, as enunciated by their party convention last month: to impose full Israeli control on the area and pre-empt a genuine Palestinian state. As a cost, they seem quite willing to accept future terror bombings.

In the National Post yesterday, Andrew Coyne wrote, “Israel wants peace . . . of that there can be no doubt. But it cannot be expected to negotiate with a leader who manifestly wants nothing of the kind.” Now this, too, if it were said about people you know around the water cooler (I know, I know, they don’t exist any more) would leave you slack-jawed.

It may be true — but of Ariel Sharon, not Yasser Arafat. It is Ariel Sharon who opposed every peace initiative of the past twenty years, openly and proudly. He has waffled only in recent months, and only in words, not deeds. Yasser Arafat, on the other hand, has been trying to make a deal for longer than that.

The Israelis used to accuse him of secretly writing the United Nations (UN) resolutions calling for a two-state solution. He signed the Oslo accord despite its gaping silence on key issues for his side. His reputation among his own people is for being compliant and slavish, hence the rise of so much opposition and their reluctant support when he’s besieged.

Refining his vision on Wednesday, the U.S. President said about the Palestinian leader: “If there is leadership compromised by terror, we won’t be on the path to peace.” Well, excuse me — you might say if you were at a barbecue — but isn’t Israel’s leader, whom you call a “man of peace,” indirectly responsible, according to his own country’s official inquiry, for massacres of civilians in Beirut twenty years ago?

And wasn’t Israel’s Menachem Begin, who made the fabled breakthrough to peace with Egypt, an unrepentant terrorist with blood on his hands? Apparently being compromised by terror does not always disqualify a leader in pursuit of peace.

The point is people get away with idiocy (“inconsistency”) in world affairs that would never fly at the breakfast table. A lot of this is similar to what used to be called the Big Lie technique practised by Nazi Germany: You say something absurd, then keep repeating it.

In fact, in a more refined version, I’d say that’s the nature of propaganda that governments routinely use. You don’t just restate the baloney, though; you must speak it with utter confidence, then be backed up by fiercely independent sources such as respected news media, while impatiently dismissing any skeptics. The result is to cow people with phrases (“of that there can be no doubt”) into distrusting their own reactions to your bull.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.