On Friday, Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan strapped an explosive vest on a 10-year-old boy and sent him in to the village of Nalgham, about 40 kilometres from Kandahar city.
When the bomb and the boy were exploded -- it is believed that vest was detonated by remote control -- two Canadian and two Afghan soldiers were injured and Canadians back home had a clearer picture of Taliban tactics and their political situation.
The Taliban have for a long time been learning from the worst terror tactics used by al-Qaida and other Islamist forces in Iraq. This seems to be the latest lesson they have mastered. This chapter of the textbook was written in Iraq in February when remote-controlled explosives were strapped to two mentally handicapped women; when they were murdered by their masters' remote controls, they took more than 70 innocent Iraqis with them.
These Taliban are the kind of people that Jack Layton's federal New Democrats and other critics of the Afghan war think that Canada should talk with as the best way of ending this country's role in the conflict. In their mind, the solution involves cutting and running, leaving these cutthroat killers and bloodthirsty bombers to whom small children are nothing more than weapons delivery systems free to win a necessary war that these Canadians do not want to fight.
These Canadians are not specifically the people that American George W. Bush had in mind on Thursday when he made a speech to the Israeli Knesset that had immediate angry reverberations back in the U.S., but they could well have been -- like the people Mr. Bush was aiming his comments at, they are the kind of appeasers who are found in every democracy but in very few totalitarian regimes or movements.
Mr. Bush said people who would negotiate with "terrorists and radicals" such as in Iraq and Afghanistan or with rogue governments such as Iran, Syria or North Korea in the hope that "some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along" are engaged in the same kind of appeasement that was used in an attempt to placate the Nazis in the years leading up to the Second World War.
His words were enthusiastically received by Israel, no stranger to the continuing dangers of appeasement, having been the victim of it so often, but they caused a storm among Democrats in the United States.
Mr. Bush did not mention Sen. Barack Obama, but his remarks appear to have touched a nerve with the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. The senator condemned that as a "false political attack" on himself and his policies, and denied that he has ever said that he would deal with terrorists. Even his arch-rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton, rallied 'round Sen. Obama, calling Bush's "comparison of any Democrat to Nazi appeasers...outrageous and offensive." No one, of course, likes to be called an appeaser. The memory of Neville Chamberlain is inescapable, waving his infamous "scrap of paper" promising "peace in our time" because he had just returned from having a chat with Herr Hitler. Hitler had seemed much more reasonable than his soldiers of the SS, who were poised to invade the Sudetenland and then Poland, sparking the Second World War.
It may be that Sen. Obama has never said that he wants to have a chat with Osama bin Laden, but he does strongly reject under any circumstances the idea that "strategies involving diplomacy are somehow soft or indicate surrender." He himself would walk and talk with state sponsors of terrorists in the Middle East like some sort of Dr. Doolittle of diplomacy. The results would almost certainly be no more successful than Chamberlain's. Unless you are talking about the terms of their capitulation, negotiating with tyrants is always a sign of weakness.
Mr. Bush did not mention it, but he might have raised a more telling example of appeasement, a more apt American analogy that has strong parallels with Iraq today -- the Vietnam peace talks, when the U.S. agreed to send Henry Kissinger to negotiate a ceasefire with Vietnamese representative Le Duc Tho.
Like Iraq today, American public support for Vietnam had vanished and the war was being badly fought by the U.S. but the Vietnamese could not win it on their own. From the moment Le Duc Tho sat down at the table, however, he would have known that the Americans were only there to surrender on the most face-saving terms they could get because the talks made no sense in any other context.
If he is elected president, Sen. Obama will inherit a war that he opposes, that is hugely unpopular, that has been badly fought by the Americans but which Islamist terrorists of Iraq can never win. On the Israeli-Palestinian question he faces a weary Western alliance, a nervous Israel too busy with political scandal to pay proper attention to military threats, and an Arab-Iranian alliance perpetuating a conflict it can never win unless Israel's allies negotiate its existence away, as well might happen with Sen. Obama's Democrats in charge. Appeasement takes many forms, and Sen. Obama appears to have found a comfortable one.
So have Canadians who would walk with Taliban and talk with terrorists who use children as bombs and have institutionalized the persecution of women and suppression of human rights. They can't win the war without a Western loss of will, so the only thing to negotiate with them is the terms of someone's surrender. That's beyond appeasement.
tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca
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