Opinion: What would happen if "al-Qaeda" (for want of an easier shorthand) produced a Yasser Arafat figure? That's to say, imagine America's enemies with a figurehead who gets treated as Arafat does - emissaries from the Vatican and the EU routinely make pilgrimages to his compound and get photographed beaming alongside him at that desk of his with the big unchanging pile of paperwork and the curiously omnipresent box of baby wipes.
He's received at the UN, EU, Arab League and (depending on the occupant) even the White House as a head of state whose lack of a state to head is a mere technical detail. I see a country called "Palestine" got to march in the 2004 Olympics parade as if it were no different from New Zealand or Denmark.
What if that happened to the broader Jihad? Already, there's a palpable longing to make the Islamists just a regular common-or-garden terrorist movement, like the IRA or the Baader-Meinhof gang. Mo Mowlam, the former Northern Ireland Secretary, oversaw the process by which Sinn Féin/IRA took up ministerships of a crown they decline to recognise. And she figures, if you can pull that off, what's the big deal with al-Qaeda? Earlier this year, she called for Osama bin Laden to be invited to "the negotiating table" - a difficult trick: what's left of the late Jihadist would fit in the salt cellar. But, putting such technicalities aside, Ms Mowlam's main point was that the whole "war on terror" approach was all wrong. "If you go in with guns and bombs, you act as a recruitment officer for the terrorists," she said.
Well, she's a Labour leftie, what do you expect? But Michael Ancram, deputy leader of the British Conservative Party, isn't sounding so very different. He's proposed a Grand Congress of Reconciliation which would sit in Istanbul with representatives of the world's Muslim nations plus America, Britain, Russia, Europe and Australia (what? no Canadians?) to thrash out areas of difference and produce a Declaration of Reconciliation detailing the appropriate compromises. For example, some mainstream imams support stoning adulteresses to death, beheading sodomites and killing Jews. Maybe the Grand Congress of Reconciliation would thrash out a compromise whereby we lightly pebble-dash adulteresses, merely castrate sodomites and kill only some of the Jews, just the troublemakers.
Alas, the other side isn't interested. My all-time favourite quote on the subject comes from Hussein Massawi, the Hizbullah leader behind the Beirut barracks bombings 20 years ago: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you". But every week some less illustrious figure confirms his general approach.
After the video beheading of US hostage Eugene Armstrong, his killer explained: "Now, you have people who love death just like you love life. Killing for the sake of God is their best wish, getting to your soldiers and allies are their happiest moments, and cutting the heads of the criminal infidels is implementing the orders of our Lord".
But very few people want to take Mr Armstrong's killer at his word. Campaigners for the release of Kenneth Bigley, who was seized in the same operation, take a more European view of his predicament - that it's all Tony Blair's fault for getting mixed up with Bush and the Americans, and that the Prime Minister should be "working for" Mr Bigley's freedom. "Working for" means finding somebody to negotiate with. The French, who had two of their journalists kidnapped despite being Europe's most ostentatious anti-Bushites, have certainly been working their Rolodexes in the region. Now Michael D Higgins, a long-time fan of this column ("slick, degrading, immoral rubbish", as he told the Dáil), has offered to travel to Iraq in the hopes that Mr Bigley's partial Irishness will redeem him in the eyes of his captors. Mr Higgins has criticised Her Majesty's government for "issuing blind statements that they would never negotiate with terrorists", and puts Mr Bigley's tormentors in the context of the Belfast Agreement and Jomo Kenyatta.
Can you feel it? The urge to mainstream the Jihad? Nudge that down the road a bit. Suppose a kind of political wing evolved parallel to the suicide bombing, like Sinn Féin and the IRA, with some Saeb Erekat-type bespoke spokesperson who plays well on CNN. The Arab League would anoint them as the sole legitimate representatives of various aggrieved Muslims, and the EU would almost certainly agree to meet with them, and even in America, the likes of Senator Patty Murray, who famously hymned Osama for "building day care facilities", would probably be eager to tour their nurseries and seniors centres. A large chunk of the West is almost begging for some fellows on the other side to sit down and talk with, because sitting down and talking is what they do best, even with folks who want to saw their heads off.
Given the growing Muslim populations in Europe and the remarkable success hitherto obscure Muslim lobby groups have had in constraining certain aspects of the war on terror, it seems almost certain that Islamist political parties will arise on the Continent within the next decade. And, given the very few degrees of separation between very prominent western Muslims - ambassadors, princes, professors - and the terrorists, it seems likely that many prominent figures in these parties will be broadly supportive of the terrorists' ends if not necessarily their means. And, given the governing principle of multicultural society - that Western man demonstrates his cultural sensitivity by pre-emptively surrendering - it seems to me that any savvy Islamist, surveying the Madrid bombing and the aftermath, might be contemplating the benefits of a twin-track strategy. In the years ahead, the urge by weak-willed allies to "politicise" the war on terror will be one of the biggest challenges for Washington.