We should never do so, of course. But we will.
It is truly said that, if you wait long enough, you see everything. And I think we shall, sooner or later, see Western governments talking more or less directly to the political front-men of Islamist terror.
In many ways, they already do so indirectly. How else can you describe the Anthony Zinni and Colin Powell missions to Yasser Arafat immediately after the 11th September massacres, which were greeted with joy by many Palestinian Arabs? Or The White House's decision to endorse the idea of a 'Palestinian State', which it had previously rejected?
They knew, though it is invariably officially denied, that the 11th September was mainly about ending US support for Israel, despite all the official flannel about how it is all about the alleged fact that Islamists 'hate our way of life' and will not rest until they have extirpated it.
It's also perfectly obvious that British commanders have talked to the Taliban in Afghanistan, though of course we officially pretend that the tribal leaders we meet in Helmand are not the Taliban.
And it's undeniable that the Americans have talked to, and bribed, many of their opponents in Iraq, some of whom trade under the brand, or perhaps it is a franchise, loosely known as 'Al Qaeda' .
But direct, explicit contact is still viewed with a gasp of maidenly horror and an urgent rustle of gathered official petticoats.
After all, if we are prepared to bargain with these people, ever, then how can we justify all the panicky palaver of the 'War on Terror', the prison camps, the waterboarding, the 'security measures', the airport striptease comedy imposed on innocent passengers?
And how will the rhetoric about "evil" , and "you can run but you can't hide" look, when that handshake finally happens? Very silly, that is how it will look. In fact, it's how it looks to me now.
Now Jonathan Powell, Anthony Blair's former henchman, has confirmed my suspicions with some astonishing remarks made to the 'Guardian' published last Saturday.
He began by saying : "There's nothing to say to al-Qaeda and they've got nothing to say to us at the moment, but....." (and this is one of those great big, enormous "buts" which warn of a real shocker on the way) "...but at some stage you're going to have to come to a political solution as well as a security solution.
"And that means you need the ability to talk.
"If I was in government now I would want to have been talking to Hamas, I would be wanting to communicate with the Taliban and I would want to find a channel to al-Qaeda."
Mr Powell's suggestion was, of course, dismissed by the Foreign Office. A spokesman there told The Guardian: "It is inconceivable that Her Majesty's government would ever seek to reach a mutually acceptable accommodation with a terrorist organisation like al-Qaeda."
I remember a much younger Jonathan Powell as a diplomat at the British Embassy in Washington DC, in the days when it was "inconceivable" that we would negotiate directly with the Provisional IRA and buy 'peace' at the price of national surrender and the mass release of hundreds of terrorist criminals.
In those days, the Washington Embassy was just beginning to grasp that Bill Clinton had decided to grind Britain's face in the mud, in pursuit of Irish American votes and to pay a large political debt.
This amazing moment in the non-existent 'special relationship' is described by that superb journalist, Conor O' Clery of the Irish Times, in his book 'The Greening of the White House', a neglected classic on real politics.
Clinton had made big promises in return for the backing of rich, respectable Irish America. He had also needed Roman Catholic working class votes - lost to the Republicans in the Reagan era, mainly over the issue of abortion. This was a way of getting quite a lot of them back.
He had pocketed the money and the votes, but he had forgotten the promises. But Irish America had not, and in early 1994 they came to collect.
Clinton knew he would need them again, if he wanted to be sure of re-election in 1996. So he listened, attentively, to what they had to say. The Cold War was over. Britain was suddenly far less important as a European ally. Clinton preferred Germany anyway.
And so the long saga began, of the granting of visas to Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, and of the political laundering of the Provisional IRA into a respectable 'partner in the peace process'.
And the pressure, ever-growing, from the US on Britain, to give in - a procedure in which we were treated, and regarded, much as if we were some slum state like Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia.
In fact, I remember a senior official of the Clinton White House, in a shocking phone call, pretty much comparing their intervention in Ulster with their intervention in Yugoslavia.
When I pointed out that we were a long-standing major ally and a free, sovereign, nation ruled according to law, she (sort of) realised what she had said. But she didn't withdraw it.
At that time, Jonathan Powell was as macho as could be on the subject of the IRA. He and the rest of Britain's envoys to Washington simply couldn't conceive how completely they had been kippered by Clinton - and by Adams.
The tiny Irish Embassy was far better (and earlier) informed about Clinton's plans and policies than our vast and grandiose mission on Massachusetts Avenue, which was repeatedly taken by surprise, and had to swallow its protests when it realised they would be useless.
A wonderfully futile and ill-tempered meeting between Bill Clinton and John Major took place during this sour period. I am sure pictures still exist of the wretched Mr Major going through the motions of being Bill's best friend.
I seem to remember the high point was a visit to Pittsburgh, to explore some rather tenuous Major ancestral connections. At least there wasn't a military band in fancy dress and a 21-gun salute on the White House lawn, the usual fate of unwanted and insignificant foreign leaders in Washington.
Perhaps this experience of total national humiliation and duplicity may have something to do with Mr Powell's interesting burst of candour.
Even back in 1992, Britain had been using back-channels to the IRA, opened as long as 20 years before with the famous failed meeting between the IRA leadership and William Whitelaw, in Paul Channon's Chelsea flat, on 7th July 1972 (and what were British ministers saying about the IRA on the record then, do you think?) .
The defeatist heart of the establishment had concluded years before (some as far back as 1920) that Northern Ireland would eventually be handed over to Dublin rule, if only the annoying Protestants could be somehow squared or bypassed.
Now, it's my view, and has been all the way through, that talking to Sinn Fein was a disgrace and a disaster. This is nothing to do with any views I might have about Irish nationalism. Sinn Fein was not, and is not, the only Irish patriotic tradition. On the contrary.
There were far better people with whom we might have reached a civilised arrangement, and so marginalised the IRA. But by going over the heads of law-abiding men, we effectively destroyed lawful, peaceful nationalism in Northern Ireland, and let the decent people of the SDLP know that their responsible behaviour was of no interest to us.
Violence, murder and terror were to be rewarded. Civilised behaviour was to be punished.
A similar message was sent to fair-minded, non-violent Ulster Protestants.
I have always thought it particularly foul that the grisly, Uriah Heeps and bloodstained gargoyles of the 'Loyalist' murder gangs were also rewarded for their savagery - whereas that very decent, constitutional and non-sectarian Unionist Bob McCartney was treated as a pariah.
I still remember the late Marjorie Mowlam - a Minister of the Crown - visiting 'Loyalist' gangsters in jail, to appease them, a horrible national shame.
Those of you who are preparing to write in accusing me of being an Orange order loyalist and hater of Roman Catholics, and perhaps a former Auxiliary or Black and Tan should please note the words above.
It is terrorism I oppose and despise, whoever does it. I do not think Britain has a good record in Ireland (oddly enough except during the period of direct rule, when most anti-Catholic discrimination was ended) and I do not think the Stormont Parliament should ever have been created.
The problem in Ireland has been for many years how to give a fair deal to both Roman Catholic and Protestant Irishmen.
Ever since then, official London has had to engage in a huge public lie, pretending that the continuing barbarities of the IRA were the work of 'dissidents' or of a fictional body called the 'Real IRA' - which, if it exists, is the first dissenting Irish Republican faction which has not been violently attacked by its supposed rivals (see the Collins -De Valera civil war, and the murderous conflict between the Provisionals and the INLA).
The result was that Unionism pretty much devoured itself.
David Trimble, compelled to endorse an agreement that must have sickened him, was popular until the reality of the surrender sank in, and the falsity of Mr Blair's unforgivable promises about violence and prisoner releases became clear.
People didn't read the actual 1998 agreement (I did) and so were shocked when it turned out that the IRA and Sinn Fein hadn't even signed it, were committed to nothing, but received huge and continuing concessions enforced by an implicit threat of a return to bombing.
Then Ian Paisley pretended (as we now know) to oppose the deal, but ended up sitting down with Martin McGuinness - and has himself been destroyed by this. He could not possibly be what he said he was, and behave in this way.
Next will come the realisation that Unionism is a dead cause, and cannot be saved, and the emigration to England or Scotland of those Protestants who can go.
All that is left for Unionism to do is to negotiate some sort of special status in the united Ireland that I expect to come about in 2016. Then the Unionists can be a minority and get EU grants to help them stage picturesque and meaningless Orange parades, advertised as an attraction by the all-Irish tourist board.
Why 2016? First because it will be the centenary of the Easter Rising, the great symbolic sacrifice of Irish Republicanism, deeply unpopular among most Irish people at the time, but transformed by the British over-reaction and the foolish executions of its leaders into a scene of national martyrdom.
Second, because by then the demographics will probably favour a vote for unification, and the formerly pro-Union Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland will have realised that their future now lies in a unified Republic.
Third, because such a vote was the ultimate purpose of the Belfast Agreement, though most of the coverage at the time failed even to mention the provision. It can,. by the way, be held every seven years until it comes up with the right answer (i.e. 'yes' to unification).
After which Northern Ireland is automatically transferred to Dublin rule, and the vote can never be held again. I am amazed that these rigged, prejudiced one-way plebiscites are thought to be a fair way of resolving anything.
I do not think this will be a specially happy outcome, not least because it will greatly strengthen Sinn Fein. SF is already the only UK political party allowed by law to raise funds abroad, a privilege it uses energetically and will make sure it keeps in any united Ireland.
It is therefore rich. It is also menacing, and after reunification it will have tremendous prestige. We can only guess at what this might lead to.
Those who are responsible for this mess, Mr Blair and Mr Powell among them, always had very little right to proclaim themselves as doughty foes of 'terror'.
It always amazed me that Mr Blair could claim with a straight face to be so militant on the subject, but in his case I suspect it was because he genuinely didn't see the connection, and probably still doesn't. Jeffrey Archer is not the only British politician with, er, a fertile imagination.
But the connection is there, and it is a very old one. Ancient readers of this site will remember a character called "Never Say Never Hopkinson", a Tory minister for the colonies in the 1950s, who declared that Britain would "never" give independence to Cyprus.
Alas, this turned out not to be the case, and he became Lord Colyton, perhaps to stop people calling him "Never Say Never Hopkinson" any more. People often make the mistake of seeing this period of imperial scuttle as part of the same process that led to our retreat in Ireland.
But in those days, Britain still struggled to cope with the fact that the loss of Singapore in 1942 meant that it would lose its whole empire in a surprisingly short time.
It was hard for Tory ministers (or even Labour ones) to admit that the whole boiling lot would have to be handed over, as quickly as possible, because we no longer had the money or the military power to keep them.
No real principle was involved, just an attempt to save face, ending in the final squalid scuttle from Zimbabwe in 1979, pretending busily that Robert Mugabe was a nice chap and a good egg.
The conflict over Ireland was an entirely different thing, deeply connected with the EU's takeover of the European continent and its need to divide and subdue the power that had for centuries prevented the continent falling under a single ruler.
Politically, it is part of the same process as the takeover of our laws by a foreign authority and a foreign court, our stealthy partition into regions and devolved 'nations' in Scotland and Wales (which will be vassals of Brussels, far less independent than they were before,when this is over).
It was also a very definitely a matter of principle, of not giving in to armed, criminal blackmail. So it is not surprising that both Labour and Tory parties enthusiastically supported this cave-in, and portrayed it as a wonder and a triumph.
And the question of supporting Israel's continued existence was, and is, a matter of the Western world's willingness to stand up for itself and - again - not to give in to armed blackmail.
Well, those who talk loudest of how they are resisting 'appeasement' and of 'wars against terror' and of 'standing firm' and even of 'Islamo-Fascism' are also those who claim, absurdly, that George W.Bush's concessions, and attempts at talks with Arafat, and his 'road map' , had nothing to with the 11th September massacre.
They would have done much more to force Israel into concessions, if it had not been for the cunning of Ariel Sharon, who quickly declared that Israel's 'war on terror' was identical to America's.
If the war in Iraq had been the triumph they hoped for, one of its results would have been a peace conference (similar to the one in Madrid after the first Gulf War) at which Israel would have been hustled to the table and compelled to make yet more lasting and real territorial concessions, in return for yet more temporary, unreliable paper concessions and promises.
In which case it would be a good deal more obvious what was going on. But wait around. It will become clearer, especially when the memoirs start to come out.
Never say never.
How can he sleep, let alone hug a bunny?
