Negotiating With Al-Qaeda

Not to show myself a yellow coward who sleeps with a Koran tucked under my pillow, but allow me a thought experiment: what about negotiating with bin-Laden? I mean, this isn't a war of aggression, is it? We're fighting to ensure our safety. And a truce would ensure our safety. So shouldn't we find out what the guy wants?

There's this mass belief among the Daniel Pipes-segment of the right that, whatever al-Qaeda says, their actual goal is to stand atop the carcass of the West while exercising total hegemony over the East. Maybe. But then there are all these moments where al-Qaeda says they'd really just like us off their holy lands and to stop invading Arab countries. And then there's my favored explanation: that bin-Laden wants power but needs support, and thinks pitting us against fairly banal demands for cultural autonomy will make America the sort of enemy he can gain power by attacking. In that way, the invasion of Iraq was a slow, loving footrub for bin-Laden's regional ambitions and desire for personal popularity. Where his original attack destroyed the Taliban and increased sympathy for America, our baffling counteroffensive against a totally uninvolved country proved us exactly the imperialists he'd always asserted.

But hearing his demands and separating the rational from the irrational makes perfect sense. What we need to do, even more than destroy bin-Laden as a biological organism, is deconstruct him as a symbol of pan-Arab resistance. If we could excise his raison d'etre, that'd sap his power base, as any further attacks or mobilizations would be self-interested, rather than nationalistic. Now, maybe he wants every American woman to don the hijab and wed a young Muslim -- that clearly won't work. But it's worth finding out what the ostensible reason for al-Qaeda's existence is, if only to understand the exact manner of monster bin-Laden wants to paint us as to ordinary Arabs. And if he exaggerates our intransigence and offers broadly supportable goals, we can decide whether or not to implement the acceptable ones (unilaterally of course) in order to weaken him.

The alternative -- a massive, high-casualty terror attack a few years down the road -- may well be inevitable, but it certainly shouldn't be our default future, grimly accepted because negotiating with our enemies (much as the Israelis do with the Palestinians, the English did with the IRA, and France did with the Algerian resistance) doesn't make us feel like Great Men of History. If this is a war, we ought to treat it like one, and that involves figuring out why we're waging it. At the end of the day, we have to decide whether we're in this for the glory of the fight or the promise of the peace and act accordingly. Negotiating with al-Qaeda may well be out of the question, but that's the sort of thing that needs to be found out, not simply assumed. And knowing their demands would do much to clarify their PR strategy. Ruling the whole thing out of the question, given the historical inevitability of eventual negotiations, strikes me as a bit silly.

Update: Maybe "negotiate" is the wrong word. I don't want to have him over for tea, just find out what his demands are. But putting it out of the question is just ahistorical. Palestinians and Arabs have done far more to the state of Israel than al-Qaeda has to us, and not only do Israeli leaders negotiate with them, but American leaders tend to broker the talks. As Sharon and his policy of unilateral withdrawal have shown, there are ways of dampening outrage and fulfilling demands while simultaneously drawing lines and showing who's in charge. In any case, I'm not sure I fully buy the argument, but it's worth thinking about, and really shouldn't be so marginalized in public discourse.