Peace

PARIS -- Christmas in snowy Bosnia is not the stuff of holiday dreams, but the deployment of NATO forces there has provided an American and allied Christmas gift not only to the people of the former Yugoslavia but to all of us.The gift to the people of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia is peace, admittedly precarious. The gift to the rest of us is the lesson that peace has to be made. It is not produced by muddled, avowedly impartial, international interventions or well-meant exhortations to dialogue, delivered to people who have nothing to say to one another.

IT IS ONLY prudence: To preserve the peace, a nation must be prepared for war. And in war, the shape of the peace to come must be envisioned. That is not visionary; it is only prudent.There is a time for war and a time for peace.As the mother of all collapses continues, the time for peace comes. The emphasis now shifts from war to diplomacy.Yes, this war had to be prosecuted with "undiminished intensity," to use George Bush's phrase. (Can his new speech writer, Tony Snow from the Washington Times, already be on the job?

Following is the text of President Clinton's Thanksgiving Proclamation:From the beginnings of our nation, we have sought to recognize the providence and mercy of God with words and acts of gratitude, indeed with effort and energy toward helping others wherever need occurred.In the colorful days and weeks when the autumn of the year brings ripe and fruitful harvest across our land, Americans give thanks for many blessings. It is a time of bounty and generosity, a time to come together in peace.

PHNOM PENH -- Optimism flows easily here these days.The long-running civil war has ended, at least on paper. The exiled god-king, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose ouster in 1970 marked the start of all the trouble, is back in the fairy-tale Royal Palace on the banks of the Mekong river. And the largest, most expensive peacekeeping operation in the history of the United Nations has taken over the town, transforming it from a dazed and desolate shell of a city into a kind of madhouse.White U.N. vehicles dominate the now-bustling traffic, and an international assortment of blue-bereted soldiers pack the once-deserted hotels and restaurants.

Ann Louise Peace, a retired office manager, homemaker and volunteer, died of heart failure Aug. 28 at Pickersgill Retirement Community in Towson. She was 88. Ann Louise Thomas was born in Baltimore and raised on Canterbury Road. After graduating from Bryn Mawr School in 1938, she attended the old Hawkins Office Training School on North Charles Street, and went to work as a typist for the Baker-Whiteley Towing Co. During the 1960s and 1970s, Mrs. Peace returned to work as an office manager for the Thomas and Thompson Co., the East Baltimore Street drugstore that had been founded by her family in 1872.

Apart from the gore, ''I Come in Peace'' is an amusing mixture of action, science-fiction and comedy.The gore doesn't do irreparable damage, but the film would have been so much more palatable without it.''I Come in Peace'' stars Dolph Lundgren, was filmed in Houston and uses the plot that was used in ''The Terminator'' and a few more movies. In the new film, Lundgren plays a cop who comes face to face with an alien, an intergalactic drug pusher who is being pursued by another alien, an intergalactic narc.

Two thousand years of religious differences -- but shared beliefs in justice and peace -- converged on Baltimore yesterday as Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy prayed together for an end to the ethnic hostilities in the Balkans.Roman Catholic Archbishop William H. Keeler organized the five-hour series of afternoon services that took place in two cathedrals, a mosque and a synagogue.The day began in the Greek Orthodox cathedral on Preston Street, continued at a mosque in Catonsville and a synagogue in Pikesville, and concluded in the Catholic basilica on Cathedral Street.

Jerusalem. -- The grins and back-patting last week in Washington between two former enemies, the leaders of Israel and Jordan, may well blossom into wider peace in the Middle East.The question is: Could it last?The question seems presumptuous, for there is much work -- and many possible pitfalls -- before suspicious Israel and its wary Arab neighbors fully agree to live in peace.Violent acts in the region or far away, such as the bombs set recently in Buenos Aires, Panama and London, can shatter a cease-fire if they score painfully enough.

WASHINGTON -- And now for the hard part in Bosnia -- peace talks.The meeting announced yesterday of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian leaders next week in Geneva is an opening gambit, which U.S. officials hope will eventually produce a face-to-face summit of the warring factions in Bosnia.But unless it does lead quickly to further dialogue, the meeting will do nothing to narrow the yawning divides over who should control what territory and hold how much power in Bosnia, the two issues at the heart of the past four years of bloodshed.

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Once the guns go silent, what comes next? This is being asked around the world, not only in Iraq but also from Haiti to Liberia, from Aceh to Burundi, from Afghanistan to Sierra Leone. All too often a fragile and incomplete peace is simply the prelude to renewed armed conflict. Depressingly, the best indicator we have of future conflict within or between countries is a record of past conflict. Last month, the United Nations broke this recurring cycle by establishing a Peacebuilding Commission to help reconstruct countries after conflict and ensure sustainable peace.