The Moderate Republican

Dennis,

Neoconservatives have a hard time separating bin Laden from Iraq, and for obvious reasons - after all, their fearless leader did tell them at one point that Saddam supported al-Qaida and had helped with the 9/11 attacks.

So when European nations want to pull out of the Iraq mess, or want to resolve disputes with guys like Sadr without bloodshed, neocons equate that with negotiating with the terrorists that actually attacked our country.

Men like Sadr have a definite political objective - he's not just a religious fanatic out to kill Americans and Israelis. His agenda is to advance Shi-ite power in the new Iraqi government. That's something you can deal with politically and diplomatically. If you deal with him militarily, he will advance his agenda militarily.

Osama is entirely different. He doesn't have political sway anywhere except, perhaps, in his native Saudi Arabia, and there because his family is very powerful in that country. His objective is to overthrow the existing Saudi royal family, whom he sees as being in bed with the "satanic" American government (and as far as the alliance goes, he's 100% correct), and replacing the Saudis with a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy, appropriate to the homeland of Islam. One of his main methods for doing so is to create terror attacks intended to drive a wedge between the Saudis and the U.S., thereby destabilizing the Saudi royal family and leaving them open to a coup (why do you think there were so many terror attacks in Saudi Arabia last year? why were most of the hijackers Saudi? - because the hope was that the attack would be seen as an attack by Saudi Arabia, not simply by terrorists). But bin Laden blundered by thinking that 9/11 would separate Bush from his family's long-time partners the Saudis. It didn't even drive a wedge between Bush and the other bin Ladens.

At any rate - bin Laden has an objective of overthrowing the Saudi government. Negotiating with bin Laden means that you're willing to discuss that possibility or anything leading to it. So political, diplomatic solutions to Osama are pretty much out of the question, and the European leaders recognize that.

So for European leaders, there is no contradiction in rejecting bin Laden but being willing to work with Sadr or the Iraqi council or Iran - because that's an entirely different, entirely separate situation.

Neoconservatives, naturally, can't make that distinction. Negotiating with ANY Islamic leader is tantamount to surrender - "we may as well start handing out Korans to everyone in America!" And of course that's the kind of thinking that will lead to their eventual demise, their myopic view of the world and political factions and leaders. Americans as a whole may not be the brightest in the world or the quickest on the uptake, but they are not dumb and eventually they will see the neoconservative agenda for what it really is.