Progressive Springfield

You know, perhaps I'm extremely naive; but it seems to me that when the world's most feared terrorist offers a truce, maybe it shouldn't be just totally dismissed out of hand.

"We don't negotiate with terrorists," Dick Cheney says. "We destroy them."

How stupid is that? How are we ever going to achieve peace if we aren't willing to negotiate? Has anyone in this administration ever heard of the word "Diplomacy?"

Granted, maybe it's a ploy; maybe bin Laden isn't being sincere. Who cares? Does it hurt to at least talk things over with the guy? I mean, it doesn't seem like his demands are all that unreasonable: pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance. We have no business being there anyway. Even if we pretended to negotiate with bin Laden, maybe we'd find out where he was hiding. One would think that might be worth a lot, even to Dick Cheney.

Or could it be that we really don't want bin Laden? Do we want to keep him at-large so we can justify the "War on Terrorism?" What would happen if we actually caught or killed bin Laden? Would we still be able to justify robbing the taxpayers to support the neo-conservatives' Crusade against the Muslim world? Could Halliburton and the rest of the military-industrial complex survive without our ongoing public subsidy?

It's enough to make you wonder...