The New York Times commemorated Al Haig’s death by reprinting this 1989 op-ed he wrote thinking through counterterrorism strategy after the U.S. got caught in a spate of Hezbollah/Israel hostage-taking. (Background.) Your task is to tell me what this means:

[A]s in any war, a commander in chief must also know that military operations can be designed to minimize civilian casualties but can never entirely avoid them. In other words, acceding to terrorists, no matter how politically disguised, is immoral.

Am I losing my powers of reading comprehension or is this a non sequitur?

In any event, Haig ultimately judges that “our policy should be one of no concessions [to terrorists], not no negotiations,” proving himself to be a naive liberal consumed by a failure of moral clarity and probably responsible in some indirect way for 9/11.