Bret Stephens: North Korea and Iran Are Practicing Extortion - WSJ.com: "It is the declared policy of the Obama administration that the United States should talk to enemies as well as friends. So why not talk to al Qaeda?
It's not as if al Qaeda isn't willing to deal. 'Whether America escalates or de-escalates this conflict, we will reply in kind,' Osama bin Laden said in 2002. Bin Laden renewed his offer in 2006, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri made it again in a videotaped message released earlier this month: 'The mujahadeen have opened the door for the West to turn a new leaf,' he said. 'But the [Westerners] insist on relations that are based on oppressing us.'
Nor is it as if there aren't serious people in the West willing to entertain al Qaeda's offer. 'If I was in government now, I would want to have been talking to Hamas, I would be wanting to communicate with the Taliban, and I would want to find a channel to al Qaeda,' Jonathan Powell, formerly Tony Blair's chief of staff, told the Guardian newspaper last year. Seconding that view was U.K. Security Minister Alan West, a former First Sea Lord, who said not talking to al Qaeda was 'silly.'"
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