Well, Are We Negotiating With The Damn Terrorists, Or NOT?

Interesting take by Billmon, over at the Whiskey Bar:

Over the past two years, the U.S. Army and its civilian overlords in the Pentagon have gone from denying the insurgency's existence, to predicting its rapid demise, to claiming they are winning the war against it, to promising victory sometime in the future.

The basis of Bush's appeal has always been his obsessively cultivated image of strength and resolution -- of never backing down or looking for a way out of a fight. Likewise, the administration's last effective selling point for the war is the classic circular argument: America must stay in Iraq because it is in Iraq. Withdrawing before the "mission" is completed would show weakness and encourage the terrorists.

Negotiating with the "terrorists" completely undermines both arguments. It makes Bush look like a trimmer -- exactly the charge leveled with such effect against John Kerry, as in this explanation from the nutcase conservatives at NewsMax:

The Bush campaign's central message on Kerry: Anyone who would negotiate with terrorists can't be trusted with U.S. national security in a post-9/11 world.

The true believers of the Bush cult no doubt can be relied upon to wipe the contradiction from their minds. We'll probably get a post any day now from the Powerline bundists explaining why only liberal traitors oppose negotiating with terrorists. But the silent majority might not be so easy to con. It supported the war when the goal was to defeat the insurgency. It was willing -- much more reluctantly -- to keep the troops in Iraq long enough for "Iraqization" to work, so that Iraqi troops could defeat the insurgency. But you have to wonder whether they'll be willing to keep sending their children to die fighting evil, head-chopping terrorists, when their government is negotiating with those very
same terrorists.