Cracking post, Bill (the Stage Manager). The bit beginning "I suspect if we all think long and hard enough" comes right to the point. It is DougR's tragedy that he can't or won't do that - possibly because he is now senior in years, which would explain why his shallow thnking is, by and large, tolerated with good grace. I doubt if the same excuse is available to Martin Gibson. I would have devoted a post exclusively to his unpleasant ravings if Lepus (whose posts are not always my cup of tea) had not disposed of his arguments with such clinical efficiency.

Responding to the Stage Manager, Kim said: "Bill, I don't know that anyone has ever neutralized terrorism at all." There are many recent examples. In Northern Ireland, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, both one-time IRA activists, are now senior politicians. Nelson Mandela, leader of the ANC - once denounced by many in the US and the UK as terrorist commies - became a world statesman.

Likewise Jomo Kenyatta, one-time leader of the Mau Mau insurgency (which when all propaganda has been removed from the equation killed about 35 people in total), who went on to be president of Kenya. Likewise Menachem Begin, a former terrorist by his own account, who eventually signed a peace accord with Anwar Sadat.

Perhaps most instructive of all, extremist Hutus who partipated in Rwanda's genocidal slaughter of 1994, in which atrocities at least as unpleasant as the Berg beheading occurred at a rate of thousans a day (with no exceptions made for women and children), are being released from detention and back into the communities they did so much to destroy, on condition only that they acknowledge their crimes.

To a no-brainer like DougR this will be unfathomable, but to Rwanda's Tutsis (and moderate Hutus), who were on the receiving end of the terror, it offers the only prospect of building harmony and long-term prosperity in a poor country.

Only with the Bush administration have we been introduced to the certainty that terrorists are always wrong, can have no legitimate grievances and can never change their spots.