That was the refrain, all through my childhood, as President Reagan consistently refused to come to the table with the thugs who took American hostages. Likewise, that was Prime Minister Thatcher’s refrain even as the IRA exploded bombs across London and turned Belfast into war zone.

Their reasoning was as simple as it was unassailable. Negotiating with terrorists only elevates and validates their cause. It gives the killers hope that their campaign of terror might someday succeed, and thus, provides the impetus for it to continue. And most importantly, terrorists are not the equals of nations. And they cannot be made so. The risks of inspiring others to become terrorists are too great.

I was pondering this tonight as I watched the evening news and learned that Secretary of State Rice is headed back to the Middle East with a plan to end the “violence”. (The press never says fighting or conflict. It’s always violence. I wonder if they think it implies civilian casualties.)

The plan, it seems, involves five points. Among them that an international force will deply along the Israeli-Lebanese border and that Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon will be folded into the Lebanese Army.

No you didn’t misread that. Our government wants to arrange it so that a bunch of terrorists will be put into the Lebanese army — a fighting force that serves the first freely elected government in a generation. It’s hard for me to imagine a more terrible idea.

But in the end, Hezbollah has to agree. They have to agree to stop their attacks. They have to agree to join the Lebanese army.

That means someone is negotiating with them.

Whoever it is should stop. Walk away. And Israel should finish the job. Hezbollah is dangerous — to Israel and to the U.S. Instead of looking for ways to “stop the violence,” we ought to be providing whatever assistance Israel needs to win the fight.

It’s time to get back to the simple principle that has served us so well: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

UPDATE: There’s a must read comment in the thread. Take a moment and read it all. And it raises an interesting question that I shall address in another post… tomorrow.

Jim: I’m going to point out a few cases in which it may be morally justified to “negotiate with terrorists” - or at least work with them.

1) Afghanistan, late 1990s: The Clinton administration refused to authorize a CIA plan to assassinate Osama bin Laden using the Northern Alliance. The Clinton Administration, and for that matter, the Bush administration pre-9/11 refused to work with the Northern Alliance because of their human-rights-abusing warlord status, ties to the Iranians and Russians, and general moral gray areas. Were the Northern Alliance terrorists? Probably, in the eyes of who they were fighting.

1.5:) If you want our intelligence community to penetrate terrorist groups, they have to be able to interact with terrorist groups. This means bribes, cash, selling arms, even setting up fake terrorist attacks to prove their loyalty. If we give cash to an opium-smuggling Pakistani tribal militia to rat out Zawahiri, is that “negotiating with terrorists”?

2) If Iraq could negotiate an amnesty and settlement with the insurgents in Iraq, should they? I can see the argument that the ceasing of hostilities is worth the moral cost of “negotiating with terrorists.”

3) While we may not want to negotiate with Hezbollah, it does not hurt to have that “someone” with a line of communications through to them (I’ll bet it is members of the Lebanese Parliament). This line of communication could just be used to issue warnings — “If you guys hit any Americans evacuating from Beirut, we’ll carpet bomb the Bek’aa Valley.” Similarly, while the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, I think the Swiss represent our diplomatic back-channel to Iran; the Pakistanis transfer Iran’s messages to us.

In the plan described above, if it worked (and I don’t think it will) I could see the value in having Hezbollah’s foot-soldiers incorporated into the Lebanese army - if Hezbollah’s men then swore allegiance to the elected government of Lebanon, and renounced taking orders from Syria or Iran. At that point, the rockets pointed toward Israel would be under the control of a more rational state that Israel could negotiate with — not some independent, unaccountable group that’s sworn to Israel’s destruction. If the rockets were launched again, it would mean genuine state-on-state war between Lebanon and Israel, not this quasi-war situation of Hezbollah vs. Israel, with Lebanon shouting, “Stop! Stop! You’ve chased away all the tourists!”

The problem with the plan discussed above is that I think it assumes a coherence and accountability within Hezbollah that isn’t there. Probably some Hezbollah would say, “Ceasefire? Sure. Sign us up for the Lebanese army,” while others would say, “No, no thanks,we’re going to stick to our core competency of killing Jews.”

This is why I think the entire discussion of a ceasefire is moot. I think it’s unenforceable on Hezbollah’s end; no matter how many concessions are made, some faction with access to rocket launchers will refuse and will fire more rockets into Israel sooner or later.

Jim, again: Jeff expands on his comments in a second comment, and with the specification that countries ought not to reward terrorists through negotiation, we have very little left to disagree about.

He mentions that working with the mujahadeen to defeat the Soviets is an example of “lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” Perhaps; as the War on Terror continues, I become increasingly convinced that victory is going to require working with some bad people to eliminate the threat from worse people.

For example, I’ve had a nagging sense that the House of Saud, rotten as they are, might be the most pro-U.S. leader of all possibilities within their territories; were they to be overthrown, the most likely replacement would be an Osama-type who would want to use his new authority as guardian of Mecca and Medina as justification to declare himself Caliphate, and/or unify the Muslim world in a war against the West. The result would be a mess, to say the least; most likely a nasty war and occupation of the oil fields in Saudi Arabia that would make Iraq look like a piece of cake. Hmm. Suddenly those double-dealing, backstabbing corrupt snakes in the Royal family look good by comparison.