I respectfully disagree to some extent with Rich and Jonah. I have no quarrel with the assertion that we have to deal with the Sunni Baathists and try to bring them into the process. And I appreciate Sec’y Rumsfeld’s insistence that under no circumstances will we negotiate with the Arab jihadists streaming into Iraq for the purpose of prosecuting their terrorist war against us. But it’s not as neat and clean as Rumsfeld suggests, or, I think, as Rich and Jonah put it–which all makes it seem as if there were two distinct categories, Arab jihadists and Sunni Baathists, and it’s ok to negotiate with the latter but not the former. And the pathogen here leads inevitably to confusion of the mission and a terrible precedent that we will have to deal with in the not so distant future.

Some of the Sunni Iraqis are terrorists, plain and simple. This has been camouflaged by referring indiscriminately to “the insurgency” but not all these guys fit this category of disgruntled former Baathists who took up arms against us and the new government in their own country, and whom we should be trying to co-opt into the political process. Here is how the Washington Post report Rich cites describes some of the people with whom we are meeting: “among the Sunnis in attendance were representatives from the Ansar al-Sunna Army, which killed 22 people in the dining hall of a U.S. base at Mosul, and the Islamic Army in Iraq, which asserted responsibility for the killing of Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni.”

The Post report does not really do Ansar al-Sunna justice. Michael Rubin provides a much more comprehensive account here. Here’s an excerpt:

[February 1, 2004 Eid] festivities were brutally interrupted when suicide bombers entered the PUK and KDP headquarters in Erbil, detonating themselves almost simultaneously, killing 109 people, including KDP Deputy Prime Minister Sami Abdul Rahman and KDP Minister of Agriculture Saad Abdullah. Adnan Mufti, a head of the PUK office in Erbil and a former deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, survived the attack in his headquarters only because suspicious bodyguards rushed the bomber, shielding him from the full force of the blast (he was nonetheless badly wounded).
Responsibility for the blasts was claimed by a hitherto obscure group calling itself Ansar al-Sunna (Defenders of the Tradition), which trumpeted the attack as a blow against “two dens of the devils . . . inflicting harm on the collaborators with the Jews and Christians.”[] The simultaneous suicide bombings–the first to cause mass civilian casualties in the once-peaceful Kurdish enclave [–] heralded the rise of a dangerous new amalgam of Kurdish Islamist militants who have returned to Iraq from Iran and foreign al-Qaeda operatives who have infiltrated the country from Syria. …
Ansar al-Sunna is an outgrowth of Ansar al-Islam [Defenders of Islam], a group with ties to Iran and which administration officials have linked to al-Qaeda.[] Initially operating under the moniker Jund al-Islam (Soldiers of Islam), Ansar al-Islam grew out of the September 2001 unification of several militant Islamist groups which had taken root in the mountains of northern Iraq along the Iranian border. …
Ansar al-Islam adheres to a rigid Salafi ideology. Its founding declaration states that “jihad in Iraq has become an individual duty of every Muslim after the infidel enemy attacked the land of Islam” and that its members “deriv[e] their jihad program and orders from the instructions of the holy Koran and the Prophet [Muhammad]’s Sunna (tradition).”[] The goal of Ansar al-Sunna is to achieve in Iraq “the Muslims’ hope of an Islamic country where Islam and its people are strong.[“] …
Although Ansar al-Sunna erupted onto the world stage with the Erbil suicide bombings, the group claims to have carried out a string of attacks stretching back to October 2003. A propaganda video it released in February offers the precise tally of 285 attacks and 1,155 people killed. In addition, Ansar al-Sunna claims to have destroyed 26 tanks, 22 armored vehicles, 15 fuel tankers, 71 personnel carriers, and 30 Humvees.

(Footnotes omitted.) Michael goes on to say that the claims of responsibility are probably inflated. But, for certain, this in not just a bunch of disgruntled Baathists. They are terrorists. If we are in negotiations with them we are negotiating with terrorists.

The mission of the global war on terror is supposed to be to destroy terror networks. Democracy building and political stability in places like Iraq are important but secondary to the imperative of eradicating groups that pose a danger to American national security. The Bush Doctrine is very clear: you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. You are not longer supposed to be able to suicide-bomb your way to the negotiating table. That’s supposed to be a relic of the September 10 world.

Down the road, Hamas is deeply involved in the political process in which we are heavily invested in the West Bank and Gaza. As we’ve noted here before, the President’s spokesman has made some very disturbing remarks about an openness to work with members of Hamas–although the President himself recently appeared to close that door. Fatah, the alternative to Hamas, is also a ruthless terrorist organization in the Arafat mold. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, another terrorist organization with a political face, is neck deep in the dynamic politics of Lebanon.

Negotiating with Ansar al-Sunna and other terrorists in Iraq sends a terrible signal to these groups that their methods work and that we are not as committed as we have claimed to be to wiping them out. It departs significantly from the moral clarity of the Bush Doctrine. If our new doctrine is to be we will negotiate with groups who employ terrorist methods if it seems reasonable under circumstances where we are trying to forge political settlements in their territories, I am afraid we will regret it.