You know what? If we worked hard at it, we could probably find a way of agreeing on humane ways of executing homosexuals and women who insist on showing their legs, not to mention all those Israelis who want to carry on living in Israel. We could even put Walthamstow or Buffalo on a different time zone. (How about 650 AD or thereabouts?) But I still can't help having doubts about BBC reporter Peter Taylor's suggestion that we'll have to sit down and talk with Al Qaeda before too long:
There are plenty of historical precedents for the most controversial option of all: talking to the terrorists. Successive British governments said they would never talk to the IRA; Mrs Thatcher would never hear of it and John Major said it would "turn my stomach". Yet in the end both Conservative and Labour governments did. The conflict is now over.
The Telegraph leader gives the idea short shrift: "The hope that there is some basis for avoiding conflict is understandable, but it is vain."
Maybe Taylor's TV series, which starts tonight, will be a little more enlightening. On the whole, I think I prefer Martin Amis's view of the Bin Laden school of philosophy:
[T]here are nuances, there are shades of black; but the consistent profile is marked by intellectual vacuity, by a fanaticism that simply thirsts for the longest possible penal code, and, most basically, by a chaotically adolescent - or even juvenile - indifference to reality. These men are fabulists crazed with blood and death; reality for them is just something you have to manoeuvre around in order to destroy it.
PS: Before anyone starts firing off hostile e-mails in Taylor's direction, it's worth recalling that his last series about Al Qaeda was an interesting antidote to the rubbish that was The Power of Nightmares. Melanie Phillips, for one, had praise for it.