We most certainly do talk to terrorists, no question about it.

We are at war with a new form of terrorism.

It's sort of the good old, traditional form of terrorism,

but it's sort of been packaged for the 21st century.

One of the big things about countering terrorism

is, how do you perceive it?

Because perception leads to your response to it.

So if you have a traditional perception of terrorism,

it would be that it's one of criminality, one of war.

So how are you going to respond to it?

Naturally, it would follow that you meet kind with kind.

You fight it. If you have a more modernist approach,

and your perception of terrorism is almost cause-and-effect,

then naturally from that, the responses that come out of it

are much more asymmetrical.

We live in a modern, global world.

Terrorists have actually adapted to it.

It's something we have to, too, and that means the people

who are working on counterterrorism responses

have to start, in effect, putting on

their Google-tinted glasses, or whatever.

For my part, what I wanted us to do was just to look at

terrorism as though it was a global brand,

say, Coca-Cola.

Both are fairly bad for your health. (Laughter)

If you look at it as a brand in those ways,

what you'll come to realize is, it's a pretty flawed product.

As we've said, it's pretty bad for your health,

it's bad for those who it affects,

and it's not actually good if you're a suicide bomber either.

It doesn't actually do what it says on the tin.

You're not really going to get 72 virgins in heaven.

It's not going to happen, I don't think.

And you're not really going to, in the '80s, end capitalism

by supporting one of these groups. It's a load of nonsense.

But what you realize, it's got an Achilles' heel.

The brand has an Achilles' heel.

We've mentioned the health,

but it needs consumers to buy into it.

The consumers it needs are the terrorist constituency.

They're the people who buy into the brand, support them,

facilitate them, and they're the people

we've got to reach out to.

We've got to attack that brand in front of them.

There's two essential ways of doing that, if we carry on this brand theme.

One is reducing their market. What I mean is,

it's their brand against our brand. We've got to compete.

We've got to show we're a better product.

If I'm trying to show we're a better product,

I probably wouldn't do things like Guantanamo Bay.

We've talked there about curtailing the underlying need

for the product itself. You could be looking there at

poverty, injustice, all those sorts of things

which feed terrorism.

The other thing to do is to knock the product,

attack the brand myth, as we've said.

You know, there's nothing heroic about killing a young kid.

Perhaps we need to focus on that and get that message back across.

We've got to reveal the dangers in the product.

Our target audience, it's not just the producers of terrorism,

as I've said, the terrorists.

It's not just the marketeers of terrorism,

which is those who finance, those who facilitate it,

but it's the consumers of terrorism.

We've got to get in to those homelands.

That's where they recruit from. That's where they get their power and strength.

That's where their consumers come from.

And we have to get our messaging in there.

So the essentials are, we've got to have interaction

in those areas, with the terrorists, the facilitators, etc.

We've got to engage, we've got to educate,

and we've got to have dialogue.

Now, staying on this brand thing for just a few more seconds,

think about delivery mechanisms.

How are we going to do these attacks?

Well, reducing the market is really one for governments

and civil society. We've got to show we're better.

We've got to show our values.

We've got to practice what we preach.

But when it comes to knocking the brand,

if the terrorists are Coca-Cola and we're Pepsi,

I don't think, being Pepsi, anything we say about Coca-Cola,

anyone's going to believe us.

So we've got to find a different mechanism,

and one of the best mechanisms I've ever come across

is the victims of terrorism.

They are somebody who can actually stand there and say,

"This product's crap. I had it and I was sick for days.

It burnt my hand, whatever." You believe them.

You can see their scars. You trust them.

But whether it's victims, whether it's governments,

NGOs, or even the Queen yesterday, in Northern Ireland,

we have to interact and engage with those different

layers of terrorism, and, in effect,

we do have to have a little dance with the devil.

This is my favorite part of my speech.

I wanted to blow you all up to try and make a point,

but — (Laughter) —

TED, for health and safety reasons, have told me

I've got to do a countdown, so

I feel like a bit of an Irish or Jewish terrorist,

sort of a health and safety terrorist, and I — (Laughter) —

I've got to count 3, 2, 1, and

it's a bit alarming, so thinking of what my motto would be,

and it would be, "Body parts, not heart attacks."

So 3, 2, 1. (Explosion sound)

Very good. (Laughter)

Now, lady in 15J was a suicide bomber amongst us all.

We're all victims of terrorism.

There's 625 of us in this room. We're going to be scarred for life.

There was a father and a son who sat in that seat over there.

The son's dead. The father lives.

The father will probably kick himself for years to come

that he didn't take that seat instead of his kid.

He's going to take to alcohol, and he's probably

going to kill himself in three years. That's the stats.

There's a very young, attractive lady over here,

and she has something which I think's the worst form

of psychological, physical injury I've ever seen

out of a suicide bombing: It's human shrapnel.

What it means is, when she sat in a restaurant

in years to come, 10 years to come, 15 years to come,

or she's on the beach, every so often she's going to start

rubbing her skin, and out of there will come

a piece of that shrapnel.

And that is a hard thing for the head to take.

There's a lady over there as well who lost her legs

in this bombing.

She's going to find out that she gets a pitiful amount

of money off our government

for looking after what's happened to her.

She had a daughter who was going to go to one of the best

universities. She's going to give up university

to look after Mum.

We're all here, and all of those who watch it

are going to be traumatized by this event,

but all of you here who are victims are going to learn

some hard truths.

That is, our society, we sympathize, but after a while,

we start to ignore. We don't do enough as a society.

We do not look after our victims, and we do not enable them,

and what I'm going to try and show is that actually,

victims are the best weapon we have

against more terrorism.

How would the government at the turn of the millennium

approach today? Well, we all know.

What they'd have done then is an invasion.

If the suicide bomber was from Wales,

good luck to Wales, I'd say.

Knee-jerk legislation, emergency provision legislation --

which hits at the very basis of our society, as we all know --

it's a mistake.

We're going to drive prejudice throughout Edinburgh,

throughout the U.K., for Welsh people.

Today's approach, governments have learned from their mistakes.

They are looking at what I've started off on,

on these more asymmetrical approaches to it,

more modernist views, cause and effect.

But mistakes of the past are inevitable.

It's human nature.

The fear and the pressure to do something on them

is going to be immense. They are going to make mistakes.

They're not just going to be smart.

There was a famous Irish terrorist who once summed up

the point very beautifully. He said,

"The thing is, about the British government, is, is that it's got

to be lucky all the time, and we only have to be lucky once."

So what we need to do is we have to effect it.

We've got to start thinking about being more proactive.

We need to build an arsenal of noncombative weapons

in this war on terrorism.

But of course, it's ideas -- is not something that governments do very well.