"We won't negotiate with terrorists"

"Terror must be stopped. No nation can negotiate with terrorists. For there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death."

George W. Bush, White House Press Conference (4/4/02)

Except when we do negotiate with terrorists:

The U.S. military is joining forces with the State Department to prepare a new Iraq strategy that includes negotiating cease-fire and power-sharing agreements with some enemy combatants, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

A "joint campaign plan redesign team" is preparing the diplomatic and military strategy for Iraq, which is expected to be approved by the end of the month. One element of the plan is to try to identify groups of people -- possibly including Sunni extremists and militia groups -- with whom U.S. officials feel they can do business, such as negotiating power-sharing and cease-fire agreements and granting economic aid, the sources said. (Watch how the new strategy aims to create stability )

But those with whom officials feel they cannot do business -- such as determined suicide bombers -- will remain targets of military forces, the sources said. The officials cited an inability to maintain current troop levels into the summer as a reason for the changed course.

"We have been focused too long on defeating the enemy," one official said. "We need to bring them to the negotiating table."

So exactly how do we decide who are "terrorists" and who are just "extremists" and how do we decide who we can do business with? How do we know who we can trust and who we can't? Is it that anyone we are able to successfully broker a power-sharing arrangement with is now, by definition, "not a terrorist"? This doesn't seem to be the best operational definition for prevailing in the "Global War Against Terrorism" over the next few decades.

It's worth noting that last yeat the bipartisan Iraq Study Group recommended cutting deals with the insurgents in Iraq as the only way to end the insurgency (although this misses the crucial fact that the US military occupation is itself fueling the insurgency there) , and that the administration has been privately trying to do this for at least two years. So even though its public stance is cynical hypocrisy of the highest order, it certainly doesn't represent any sort of new strategic thinking. The bottom line is that, as I and many others have noted, this disasterous situation in Iraq is not going to end until Bush leaves the White House in 2009, or the Democrats gain a veto-proof majority in the Senate and grow some balls.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/resist/2005/0802straw.htm

In light of all this, it's hard not to agree with John Edwards' recent assessment during his speech this week at the Council on Foreign Relations that the Global War in Terror is an inaccurate descriptor of what we're involved in and where the administration has placed its goalposts for final victory.