source:
http://www.news.faithfreedom.org/index.php?name=3DNews&file=3Darticl=
e&sid=3D1899&theme=3DPrinter
Last month's meeting between former President Jimmy Carter and Hamas
leader Khaled Mashaal in Damascus has once again highlighted the
perils of negotiating with terrorists. Carter emerged from that
meeting and declared that Hamas, under certain conditions, was
prepared to recognize Israel. Like so many other na=EFve idealists, he
does not understand that Hamas was, is and remains an uncompromising
jihadist organization bent on the conquest of its neighbor, regardless
of what it says.
In March 2007, the Director of the Centre for Defense Studies at
King's College, Peter R. Neumann, laid out the essential premise for
not negotiating with terrorists: "Democracies must never give in to
violence, and terrorists must never be rewarded for using it.
Negotiations give legitimacy to terrorists and their methods undermine
actors who have pursued political change through peaceful means. Talks
can destabilize the negotiating governments' political systems and
undercut international efforts to outlaw terrorism."
Nevertheless, democratic governments routinely conduct secret
negotiations with terrorists although they often achieve significantly
different results. The question is why? In 1993, the Israeli
government secretly negotiated the Oslo Accords with the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) - a decision the Israelis have long
since come to regret. With Jihadists ensconced on her northern,
eastern and southern borders, Israel now faces an existential threat
from all sides. The more concessions it makes, the greater the demands
of its enemies. On the other hand, the nationalist IRA agreed to lay
down its weapons, pledged to pursue its goals through the political
process and was able to achieve an historic power-sharing agreement
that replaced British rule in Northern Ireland, so there seems to be
distinction between terrorists who seek to bomb their way to the
negotiating table (like the IRA) and terrorists who are only
interested in blowing up the table altogether (like the Jihadists) for
a grander purpose.
This distinction led Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University and
William Zartman of Johns Hopkins University to conclude that the goal
and ideology of terrorist organizations should be the litmus test in
determining their willingness to compromise - all of which leads to
the secret negotiations currently underway between the US and Iran. In
negotiating with the Iranians, we are negotiating with Jihadists who
have a religiously-inspired absolutist, even apocalyptic vision of the
future, who have consistently lied about their nuclear enrichment
program, who have threatened Israel with a second Holocaust (even as
they denied the first) and who have made no secret of their global
Jihadist ambitions.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Chinese General Sun Tsu wrote in The
Art of War that you cannot defeat an enemy unless you understand its
nature. Yet, many in our political echelon argue that we can reduce
the level of violence and lessen the threat to our foreign interests
by establi****ng a dialogue with Jihadists. What is needed, we are
told, is a better mix of diplomatic carrots and economic sticks and,
as reasonable men, we will then be able to sit down and resolve our
differences just as the Irish Catholics and Protestants did in
Northern Ireland.
What's missing here is any understanding of this enemy's mindset and
game plan. Jihadists justify murder in religious terms because they
see the world populated by infidels who must be eradicated or
subjugated. Their agenda is purely theocratic and absolute with not a
scintilla of concern for the lives of non-believers anywhere. As such,
negotiation with them is useless for there is nothing to negotiate.
Western diplomats are like children playing with fire because they
fail to grasp that the Middle East is not Northern Ireland and this
enemy is not the IRA. That means the likelihood of a compromise with
Ahmadinejad in Tehran or any of his Jihadist cronies in the Middle
East will be about as effective as were negotiations with Adolf Hitler
who, in 1938, told his General Staff after meeting with British Prime
Minister Chamberlain - "Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at
Munich." Chamberlain's belief that Hitler was a reasonable man who
would accept a good deal when he saw it, failed to consider the
ideology and global ambitions of the Third Reich.
Similarly, during the Iranian embassy crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini told
his Revolutionary Guards that they had nothing to fear from America
after the Embassy take-over, since President Carter's only response to
the hostage-taking was to impose ineffectual sanctions, an embargo on
Iranian oil, a rescue mission that turned into a farce and to send his
Secretary of State to Tehran to apologize for unspecified past
transgressions. Khomeini's response was to order the American flag to
be painted at the entrance to air****ts, railway stations, ministries,
factories, schools, hotels and bazaars so the faithful could trample
it under their feet each day.
To Jihadists, Western threats mean nothing without the fear that they
will be removed from power by force if they continue to pursue their
Jihad. That's why Hamas in Gaza is seeking a ceasefire with Israel and
its leaders are in hiding. That's why, in the aftermath of the U.S.
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003, Libyan dictator Muammar
Qaddafi announced that he would dismantle his WMD programs. That's why
Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 believing that they
were next on the US "hit list" after Afghanistan and Iraq. But when
the Iranians realized that American anti-war sentiment worked in their
favor and that they could sap America's fighting spirit in Iraq
through attrition without fear of being overthrown, they re-started
their conversion and uranium enrichment programs.
U.S. and Western leaders must confront the reality that Jihadism is
not a "problem" to be resolved through roundtable discussions,
negotiations or even sanctions. The Iranians and their Middle East
proxies are not "reasonable people" in the classic Western sense. They
are the vanguard of a religious crusade that threatens the continued
progress of the American experiment in the Middle East and even the
European Enlightenment. By seeking to accommodate their demands, by
suggesting that regime change is no longer on our agenda, and by
forcing Israel into making dangerous concessions to appease them, we
have shown weakness.
For all these reasons, Jihadists like Ahmedinejad and his Middle East
surrogates are convinced that the West is a "paper tiger" and only
prepared to impose ineffectual sanctions that Switzerland, Russia,
China, Germany, Singa****e, Malaysia, the United Kingdom and the United
Arab Emirates are bypassing for purely economic reasons (according to
the January 16, 2008 GAO Re****t).
Neither Jimmy Carter nor much of America's political establishment
understands that this enemy cannot be moderated and will never
compromise on its ideological agenda. They can only be defeated as
were the Nazis before them. And yet, we continue to place our faith in
"dialogue" and an almost irrational belief that we can convince them
to moderate their "views" by correcting "misunderstandings" and
fa****oning a deal - and that's why the Iranians, the Syrians and the
others are convinced that we are weak and destined to lose.
Jimmy Carter's pointless journey to Damascus is symptomatic of a far
greater malady in Western society - the embrace of a political culture
that holds an unswerving devotion to "dialogue"; to the belief that a
religious Jihad can be moderated through improved communications,
compromise and engagement. There is a reason why we should not engage
these Jihadists. It is because they are not interested in limited,
nationalistic goals like the IRA. Theirs is a religious crusade aimed
at conquest and submission and they are waging it on a global level
even as we seek to reach out to them. We never learn from history.
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