I’m sorry, I also found this cite a bit funny. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were different arms of the same terrorist group to begin with. They were also strictly regimented political parties, not cell-based groups like we have running around today. It was much easier for the victorious Bolsheviks to decapitate and subdue the Mensheviks - not only because they knew their leadership intimately, but also because they were fighting for (basically) the same thing with different political control. The Soviet Revolution is a pretty complex deal - don’t boil it down to regime fighting terrorists, especially since most other countries were still calling the regime terrorists.
In general, most of the cites on your list are rebellions or domestic groups (which are frequently the same thing). We aren’t talking about a domestic group here. Those are relatively easily dealt with.
What we have to deal with is international terrorism, which is another beast. There is no set group of people who are leaders you can off and call it a day. There is no headquarters. It is more like a hydra - many different arms of the group acting independently and tied together by a common cause. For instance, the groups that have been targetting Spain have nothing to do with Osama.
The problem with fighting international terrorism is that the terrorists cover many countries and hide behind many governments. It is not possible to attack them wherever they go. We could conquer the entire Middle East and call it Amerikastan, but Al Qaeda and the other groups would still exist.
An additional problem is that the more you hit one arm, the stronger the other arms grow. We pissed off a lot more people invading Afghanistan and Iraq than we had mad at us before, and we created a great deal of sympathy for Al Qaeda that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.
Now, the other question to this issue - can we negotiate with Al Qaeda? Well, we run into the same problems with negotiations as we do with military action. There are many brances of the organization, and they aren’t under one guy. Osama could appear on international TV tomorrow french kissing Bush and order everyone to lay down their arms and go home - and most of them wouldn’t do it.
If you take them literally on their “we will wipe America off the planet” threats, you are pretty gullible. Unfortunately, this works against them, because most Americans are pretty gullible.
Still, you can limit how many people you do piss off, and hope most of them run out of money and/or interest and/or volunteers. You generally do this by figuring out what they want - in this case, they want American imperialism to stop. Of course, Bush would never agree to that, so it is a moot point, for now. We’ve also gone and gotten our paws tied up in Iraq, which makes following their requests entirely impossible for the next decade.
So no, negotiating won’t do anything for a while. This is why my suggestion was that, in 10-20 years, if we play it cool, we’ll be able to negotiate with the Islamic states themselves and by proxy come to an arrangement.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I wish I had a brilliant solution here, but the best I could have offered before the Iraq mess was get our paws out as much as possible, smile nicely, and hunker down. Now that we’re entangled in Iraq… well, I think we’re pretty fucked. We just took the reason they hated us and magnified it a few thousand times.