You can't negotiate with terrorists. Not substantively anyway. To state the obvious (but apparently not obvious to many Europeans) if you give them want they want, they understand kidnapping and terrorism works and will give you more of it. Probably a better thing would be to do just the opposite of what they want -- but not consistently enough to support reverse psychology either.

This just shows you shouldn't be in Iraq.

Oh, really? If each terrorist action shows "We shouldn't have made 'em mad", then we're all sunk until the ladies don burqas, I renounce Jesus as my saviour, others quit screwing around and drinking, and we start living under sharia.

That is what they want.

It's not some piddling nonsense about us not engaging in global trade, or failing to elect Democratic presidents, as guys like Michael Moore, in their deepest soul, earnestly seem to think. Just because leftists identify with Islamist extremist terrorists doesn't mean that Islamist extremist terrorists identify with leftists.

(But such mistakes are a stunning, inadvertant admission by leftists.)

I heard somewhere that if your child has a loud obnoxious temper tantrum in public, and you give into it, researchers found you were going to get an average of forty-two more of them for your efforts. (I often think there are many lessons about international relations and crime which can be learned by studying children.)

So anyway, South Koreans: thank the Spanish voters, who capitulated to terrorist demands, sending them the message: "Yes, this works! Please do more of it!"

But y'all knew that already, right?