Negotiating with evil

Leftists pride themselves on being (as they would have it) "enlightened." And one of the fundamental beliefs of self-styled "enlightened" Westerners is that every disagreement can be resolved by negotiation. Accordingly, no enlightened society ever needs to resort to violence.

From there it takes only a millisecond to reach the obvious conclusion that any Western leader who doesn't buy into this belief system, and instead takes the nation to war, is unenlightened--a primitive, a throwback to our barely-rational ancestors.

Fair enough. But members of the 'every disagreement can be negotiated' school eventually run into a nasty reality, in one of two forms:
--an opponent regime that views negotiation as a sham, a tool to be used to delay military conflict until they've improved their position; or
--they negotiate a settlement that quietly consigns millions of people (either third-party nationals or residents of the opponent) to death, torture, and permanent oppression and persecution.

(Let me hasten to add that not all instances of these two outcomes can be blamed on left-lib-"progressives", either: The Left is correct in pointing out that during the Cold War there were several cases of conservative strategists making deals with dictators who abused their own people when the dictator's support served the strategic goal of blocking communist expansion. Conservatives would probably gain support by openly acknowledging these past policies.)

But at the moment, the issue is how to respond to Islamic terrorism. Left-lib writers claim that 1) Islam is really a peaceful religion; 2) if the U.S. would just [fill in the proposed concession-du-jour here], they'd stop attacking us; 3) any restrictions on individual freedom in Islamic nations are wholly their business, and of no concern to us; 4) since the U.S. has nuclear weapons but hasn't used them since WW2, we must be willing to accept that *all nations* have the right to the same weapons.

If I've mis-stated Leftist thinking here, perhaps someone on the Left would be good enough to clarify their side's position.

Clearly the mere fact that a religion proclaims that it's devoted to "peace" doesn't make that true. And it's been pretty well shown that when people finally get around to reading the 'fine print', Islam only extends peace to those who either convert or submit to Islamic law.

These are some mightly harsh conditions, IMO.

Yet the Dem/Left keeps trying to negotiate. One imagines a conversation between a typical Leftist pol and Hezbollah going something like this:

Okay, so you want the U.S. to withdraw troops from all Islamic countries. Well that certainly wouldn't be a problem--half the American public already supports that, and us enlightened folks have been pushing that all along. Anything else? Stop supporting Israel, you say? Well, that will take a lot of horsetrading with a lot of congresspersons, but it's not a deal-breaker; we can negotiate on that.

Anything else? You say Americans must accept Shari'a law? Well what does that involve, exactly? Banning alcohol? You know we tried that back in the 1920's. Didn't work, but if it would give us peace with Islam--make that "peace with honor"--we could take another shot at it. After all, we've got, what, 5,000 heavily armed BATF agents in addition to the FBI, so we could probably make it stick this time. What else?

No sex on television? Actually the fundy-Christian Right will love that, so that's really easy. But of course Hollywood won't want it. After all, a lot of people out there make a *really* good living from that. And the billboard people will squawk. But hey, let us make some calls... Anything else?

You say all homosexual activity will be a capital offense?

You mean, like, the death penalty? Ah.

Captain, please throw these awful men out of our office. And then see if you can locate Secretary Rumsfeld for us.