NEWTON'S LAW: FILLING OUT NEW WORLD ORDER AND PICKING THE PEACEMAKERS

How is it these days with the New World Order? True to its billing, it is not like the Old World Order, which isn't exactly what we called it, which was nothing before a world leader decided it should be called something and that "something" should at the very least be a "new" something.

Convoluted as that last sentence might be, it is not nearly as murky as that touchy exercise we love to call high-level diplomacy. In these rather confounding days of Middle East conflict (which is definitely Old World Order being dragged into its latest phase), a question goes begging:

Where do warring souls go to place their New World Order?

If your vowel-heavy name sounds like the noise made by a poet's sneeze and you look like a character actor who gets duped in a thousand slapstick films, you might be the foreign minister of an aggressor nation antsy for a few days' relief from bomb attacks and a shoulder to cry on.

An Academy Award went to a 1980 film called "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears." These days, the Kremlin stocks more facial tissue than a mortuary.

New World Order. You figure it out.

Does Mikhail Gorbachev openly display the medallion bearing Alfred Nobel's countenance and representing his own supposed commitment to peace? Maybe he keeps it in the outer office as inspiration for staff members assigned to intercepting incoming phone traffic from Vilnius.

In any case, Gorbachev did some at-home shopping this week, looking for a bargain in the Persian Gulf. (Why fill out a New World Order if you can't get a deal, huh?) Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz (gesundheit!) blew into Moscow Monday for an audience with the laureate and blew out (reluctantly, probably, given the noise levels in his neighborhood) with a secret peace proposal in hand.

On his way home, Aziz, perhaps only making a last-ditch effort to avoid Iraqi airspace, paid a courtesy call to Tehran, where the best courtesy you used to expect was not being taken hostage.

More peace discussions, this time with Iran. What the heck? Oh, that's right ... New World Order.

This is what we've come to, apparently, with humanity's butchers and global miscreants flocking for solace, face-saving and poker-faced peacemaking. Okay, that may be too harsh.

Maybe Gorbachev was only offering some neighborly advice on the dangers of coerced annexations that don't pan out. Maybe Aziz and Iran's Hashemi Rafsanjani were only swapping anecdotes of terrorism, yearning for the good old days when America stood by helpless and aimless.

We see nothing to this point that indicates Saddam Hussein has gotten the hint. To refashion the words of a country song, he is looking for peace in all the wrong places. The man who angered the most forgiving souls on the planet, those who sit in the United Nations, has yet to detect the clue that his nation's survival depends not on resourcefulness found in Moscow or Tehran or Amman but in the abandonment of his own treacherous ambitions.

Again, maybe Aziz just needed a road trip to pick up what must be sagging spirits. Maybe Gorbachev was looking to score a few diplomacy points, since his domestic policies tend toward bread lines as opposed to crowning achievements.

Maybe it's just one big game of Good Cop/Bad Cop, with Moscow taking a turn at offering the suspect a stick of gum.

All this posturing aside, something seems funny with the whole business. If the Soviet Union and Iran are emerging as peace brokers for the planet, I'm not sure this New World Order is such a good thing.