POST: Northern Ireland's Top Cop: Negotiate with Al Qaeda, By Kris Alexander, Danger Room, June 04, 2008

An interesting perspective. Revolutionary movements lose their revolution when they make pacts with the enemy--"devil" or no.

This is much temptation to make all foreign policy, all national security, and all grand strategy terror-centric (Bobbitt being the most eloquent).

I myself see no reason to reward their asymmetry with symmetry. To me, that is the essence of going wobbly: recasting this grand horizontal scenario called globalization (i.e., nation states integrating via economics, then security, then politics) to foreclose the enemy's capacity for hit-and-miss vertical scenarios.

Their friction merely reflects our far more powerful force.

So avoid going wobbly, avoid giving into fear, don't play down, and maintain faith in what got us here and gets us there: meeting the demands of a growing middle class. For decades that was an intra-national affair. Now it's an international or global middle class whose emergence drives change and adaptation far beyond the puny terrorists, who remain a useful bogeyman for a networked age but control nothing but our fears and attention spans--when we let them.