Paul Thomas: Impossible to negotiate with fanatics and psychopaths

Given the untold trouble short people have caused throughout history, it's no surprise to learn that North Korea's Kim Jong-Il gets around in platform shoes.

Short man's syndrome is one of the milder disorders warping this dandelion-haired tyrant's behaviour: from a distance one can detect egomania, paranoia, megalomania, and narcissism, so God only knows what a thorough psychiatric evaluation would flush out.

(Last year United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to speculate on Kim's sanity on the grounds that she'd never met the man. What happened to the principle that by their deeds shall you know them?)

The stark fact of the matter is that a certifiable lunatic running a rogue state is now the proud owner of a nuclear bomb. Said rogue state is apparently knowledge-sharing with Iran, an implacable theocracy also hell-bent on becoming a nuclear power, and whose President has stated his intention to wipe Israel off the map.

It no longer takes a pessimist to believe that nuclear warfare and/or nuclear terrorism is inevitable. What's to be done? Britain's Independent newspaper editorialised on this fraught question under the heading "Diplomacy remains the only way forward".

In other words, the only conceivable course of action is the one that's got us into this mess. For some years now the international community has tried to cajole or bribe North Korea and Iran into abandoning their nuclear programmes.

They've pocketed the bribes, made rude noises or told bare-faced lies depending on their tactical imperatives, and carried on assembling their doomsday machines.

One wonders what it would take to persuade advocates of the softly, softly approach that diplomacy isn't working and it might be time to consider other strategies. The nuclear incineration of Tokyo or Tel Aviv or San Francisco?

Softly, softly may well be the way to go, although I suspect it's driven as much by a horror of the alternatives as the conviction that diplomacy will save the day. But with Iraq's descent into chaos providing a vivid daily reminder of the risks and uncertainties of pre-emption, the proponents of "speak firmly and carry a carefully worded UN resolution" control the high ground. The battlecries of the gung ho brigade, so strident when Saddam's statue came tumbling down, are almost inaudible now.

In the West we think that no issue is so black and white, no disagreement so fundamental, no cause so sacred that disputes can't be sorted out by negotiation. The parties just need to sit down and talk to each other and be grown-up enough to accept that in the real world you never get everything you want. Life is a compromise: you give a little, they give a little and you end up splitting the difference. You end up with a deal.

The problem is that the likes of Kim and Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden don't seem to share our view that an imperfect deal is better than no deal at all. They are absolutists whose aim is not to reach accommodation with their adversaries but to crush them. They're not merely disinterested in compromise, they're contemptuous of the very concept and regard the West's partiality to it as just another manifestation of our weakness and decadence.

How then do you negotiate with someone whose demands are non-negotiable? Take militant Islam. Let's presuppose that the stuff about restoring the Caliphate is just hot air and they're not really serious about converting the entire world to Wahhabism at gunpoint. So what do they really want? What would actually persuade them to call off the jihad and leave us alone?

Zero foreign presence, whether military or commercial, in the Middle East? Well, they're not the only ones who want that. Many - perhaps most - Westerners would be happy to see the US military and its oil companies sent packing. The annulment of Israel? It's tempting to think that if only the Israelis could be persuaded to pack up and move, peace would at last descend on the world's tinder-box.

In a 2002 essay, commentator Christopher Hitchens suggested that the Jewish Promised Land may actually be "a secular, multi-ethnic democracy, none the worse for being second home to many other wanderers and victims too. America, in a word. The best hope and, yes, perhaps the last one."

But it defies belief that the Jews can be talked or bullied into giving up Israel. From an Islamist point of view, that only leaves force. The rest of the world might huff and puff about dispatching a UN peace-keeping force to the region but America under any foreseeable president won't stand by while the Israelis are bombed out of existence or driven into the sea.

So the negotiations collapse over the second item on the agenda and the countdown resumes.

September 11, 2001 was, among other things, a failure of imagination on the part of the US intelligence apparatus; the Bush Administration then suffered a catastrophic failure of the imagination when it visualised post-Saddam Iraq.

Those who insist on seeing psychopaths as hard-ball players using fanaticism as a negotiating position are equally guilty of making the wish father of the thought.