Broadcast for 3RRR, Sept. 04

We don't negotiate with terrorists. Well, somebody did. And sure enough, it was soon announced, after only two American decapitations, that two female POWs Dr Germ and Madam Anthrax, would coincidentally be let out in the next few days, and then only one, and then one in the next few weeks, and then none at all, because, well, they were in American custody, and although all power in Iraq now resides in the Interim Iraqi Authority, it doesn't when Bush says it doesn't, which is most of the time.

America never negotiates with terrorists? Well, it negotiated with the Viet Cong, for five years in Paris, hoping to facilitate, to speed up, to make more easy, the American withdrawal from Vietnam. Were the Viet Cong terrorists? I think so. Americans negotiate every week with hostage takers in American cities, with bull-horns and snipers and television cameras, so often that each police department now has a trained negotiator, to calm down the armed madman in the office building, or the fast food outlet, or the high school, or the private home.

America negotiates with bad people all the time. They negotiated with Hitler, who offered to send them, for instance, a million captive Jews he had no use for; they turned him down of course, finding it too costly a gift; and so they all died, very unprettily. America negotiated with Saddam Hussein the terms of his capitulation in 1991: no WMDs, no chemical weapons, strictly limited oil sales, no regime change. America and Britain negotiated with Colonel Gaddafi, the known accomplice of the Lockerbie bombers, and rewarded him with business contracts worth billions for disarming, repenting and ceasing to be a terrorist.

Negotiation is what you do in life most days. With James Hardie some of us will soon be negotiating a price, in tens of millions, for the thousands of us they carelessly, shruggingly, breezily killed with mesothelioma, an act of, well, corporate terrorism we bring to the negotiating table as a matter of course.

Do we negotiate with terrorists? Well, it depends. In Beslan, before the final catastrophic panic, trained negotiators secured the release of a number of old people and babes in arms. Was this worth doing? Or do we never negotiate with terrorists, and let even babes in arms burn up in a pointless holocaust?

We never negotiate with terrorists? Let us imagine for a moment that the Bali bombing has not taken place, but that tonight, Friday night, the Sari nightclub, full of Australians, is surrounded and held hostage by twenty-two Jemaah Islamiyah terrorists, armed with bomb belts and Kalashnikovs and machetes, and they threaten to behead, one by one, the two hundred Australians there, until we pull out our one hundred and twenty troops, or is it one hundred and forty troops, pull them out of Iraq.

What do we do then? Well, one thing is certain. We never negotiate with terrorists. Alexander Downer says so. And he's a man of steel.