On Beslan, From Cornwall

I am now down in Cornwall after just a brief stopover in Oxford in which I saw very little of what I would have liked to have seen. But a good friend from college, Gillian, and her husband James, live here near Bodmin with their little one, Sophie, and their pending one, who is set to arrive in the first week in October. I figure that as an academic I'll have cause to hit Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere over the course of my career, so I do not want to shortchange a chance to spend time with a friend.

I have seen the coverage in the Boston Globe, Washington Post and New York Times online, and I have to say, the coverage on this side of the pond of the horrible events in Russia is probably more intense, more outraged. Part of this is because of the nature of newspaper coverage in England, which radiates outward from London and which is thus competitive in a way far different from what we have in the States. But part of it is also because, when it comes to the"War on Terror," an increasingly difficult construct to articulate, we sometimes are a bit myopic in the U.S. The events in Beslan are sickening and disturbing. Clearly they fit into a war against extremist elements, but how? This is especially vexing given the relationship we have cultivated with an increasingly ineffectual Vladmir Putin, who by simply echoing the bromides of the War on Terror without actually articulating what it means in the Chechen context, has merely used terror as a cover for his own monstrosities.

It is this last factor that is most difficult to convey, because those of you who have read my writinga about terrorism know that on this issue, I am no relativist. There is no justification for the intentional targeting of civilian populations for political goals. But that does not mean that nation states cannot do things to exacerbate, to taunt, to invite the terrorists to engage in their ghastly actions. Putin has managed to do this in myriad ways, and his people are paying the price.

But what should he do? The reaction here has been to invoke the situation in Northern Ireland. There is lots of noisome relativism coming from London's chattering classes, the sort of vapid commentary that makes Saddam Hussein's Iraq seem merely a logical equivalent to the United States, or that parallels liberal democracies with groups whose sole purpose is to murder innocents. The United States is not merely the other side of Hussein's coin; Israel is not simply a moral equivalent to Hamas. Those who would make such claims abandon any sense of perspective and have closed the moral loop to the point where conversation becomes a waste of time.

But what of the Northern Ireland comparison? That peace has held for what will soon be a decade. It did come about as an effect of negotiation. But here is how it worked: The IRA and Sinn Fein, whatever their links, and those links were manifest, could always plausibly claim to be separate. Whatever the IRA's loathsome means, it always had a great deal more sympathy in the world than other groups (has any terrorist organization ever had better PR than the IRA?) and Sinn Fein had at least garnered enough respect so that Gerry Adams and others could go to the negotiating tables. Many of us who have looked closely at the situation in Israel have not argued against nwgotiating with the PLO. We have argued against negotiating with a PLO so demonstrably linked to terrorists and with neither the will nor the wherewithal to stop those terrorists from carrying out their evil deeds. The South African government (who were the real terrorists in the apartheid years, so this analogy is only a structural one, not a moral equvalent) similarly decided that they had found an hoinest broker in the ANC even if it (wrongly) believed Mkhonto we Sizwe to be a terrorist organization.

This is what perhaps could have happened in Chechnya. But how now, with stories of children sucking urine from their clothes in hopes of getting some hydration, with the ghastly shrieks of funeral mourners, with the stench of murder in the air, can Putin ever go to the table with such people? Now it may be the case that he cannot. And he cannot because for so long we uncritically allowed him to tie in his far more complex and nuanced situation in Chechnya with our War on Terror. We did so because we could see into his soul, as if such nonsense should have a role in foreign policy, a world in which we spy on our allies and coerce even our friends. Alas, Putin's soul has proven not to be as pristine as we once thought. And now the body counts are piling ever higher in a little town in Russia of which not a one of us had ever heard prior to last week, the name of which now rolls off of all of our tongues.