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eridani

(51,907 posts)
Tue Jun 3, 2014, 03:26 AM Jun 2014

Juan Cole: Dear GOP: The US Has Negotiated With Terrorists and Amnestied Them All Through History


http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/24009-focus-dear-gop-the-us-has-negotiated-with-terrorists-and-amnestied-them-all-through-history

Tagging movements as “terrorist” and then refusing to deal with them is frankly stupid. The Taliban in Afghanistan are not a small terrorist group like, say, the Italian Red Brigades of the 1970s and 1980s. They are guerrillas belonging to a movement that at one point had captured the state and run it. The Taliban are now a guerrilla group, holding territory.

The US has all along negotiated with the guerrillas it has fought on the battlefield. William Howard Taft (later president) in the Philippines was all for negotiation with Filipinos who rejected US rule, and he created “attraction zones” to win them over. At the conclusion of the Aguinaldo resistance to US occupation in 1902, Teddy Roosevelt declared a general amnesty for the resistance fighters. These resistance fighters had committed some atrocities, including on captured US troops, but Roosevelt just let them walk free. Talk softly, carry a big stick, and let all the terrorists go, seems to have been his motto.

The US negotiated with the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, who were very much analogous to the Taliban and whom the US would now certainly term “terrorists.” In 1973, the US used intermediaries to negotiate with the Viet Cong for release of captured US soldiers at Loc Ninh. Americans on the political right made a huge issue about 1300 US soldiers never having been released by the Viet Cong (only about 400 were), and the shame that these men were left on the battlefield by the Nixon and Ford administrations. Conservatives seem to want to have it both ways. If you negotiate the release of US captives with the enemy you are “negotiating with terrorists.” If you don’t, then you have left soldiers behind on the battlefield. The fact is that the only way to have freed them was to have offered something for them in detailed negotiations. As for the Viet Cong “terrorists,” many of them are in government now and the US has cordial relations with them.

In the 1980s radical Shiites in Lebanon took American hostages. In order to free them, the Reagan administration not only negotiated with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini but actually stole T.O.W. anti-aircraft munitions from Pentagon warehouses and shipped them to Tehran, receiving the money for them in black bank accounts and sending it to right wing death squads in Nicaragua. Khomeini and his government were listed as terrorists by the State Department at the time, and selling weapons to Iran was highly illegal. Not only that, but the US was allied with Iraq at the time, so Reagan screwed over Baghdad this way. Reagan did it, in part to free US hostages in Lebanon (Iran put pressure on its clients for their release).

As for encouraging groups to take US hostages, if the GOP really is so worried about this outcome they should stop putting the idea in the minds of terrorists by trumpeting it all over the news media. There was no rash of hostage-taking of Americans after Reagan bribed Iran to have them released, so the expectation is ahistorical.
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Juan Cole: Dear GOP: The US Has Negotiated With Terrorists and Amnestied Them All Through History (Original Post) eridani Jun 2014 OP
Using Raygun as an example of what should be done? Egnever Jun 2014 #1
That negotiating with enemies, even nasty ones, has lots of historical precedent n/t eridani Jun 2014 #2
Well Rayguns turned into quite the spectacle Egnever Jun 2014 #3
 

Egnever

(21,506 posts)
1. Using Raygun as an example of what should be done?
Tue Jun 3, 2014, 03:32 AM
Jun 2014

I am not sure what the author is trying to say.

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