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Posted October 29, 2002
It was a good headline: No Quick End in Sight for Hostage Standoff.
Too bad, then, that this Moscow Times headline proved inaccurate. On the same day as the dated article, crack troops,
after gassing the theater wherein Chechen terrorists held hostages, stormed in. In the course of killing the majority of the terrorists, quite a few hostages died in the process. The article, whose title was betrayed by events, nonetheless proved accurate:
Leonov and Goncharov both reiterated the official Russian position that the prime concern of the authorities must be the safety of the hostages, and warned that there would be heavy casualties if crack troops storm the theater.
It is a great pity that some other resolution was not found. Crack troops stormed the theater, and there were heavy casualties, despite (or, because of) a gassing prior to the troops moving in.
But it must be admitted: a majority of the hostages did survive. No matter how messy and unsettling the death toll may be, and no matter how apologetic Putin may sound in public, I doubt if many Russians will see this debacle as much of a sign defeat. It was a victory over terrorists, and the deaths of the innocents can be conveniently blamed on those rebels, not on the crack troops
who stormed the theater.
In America, however, the events take on a somewhat more disturbing complexion.
Nearly a decade ago, the U.S. government had a vaguely similar problem. The government had surrounded a "compound" of buildings, and inside that compound were desperate people with "hostages." In order to save those "hostages," the FBI mounted an attack (prefaced by a gas attack, as in Russia).
The parallels then break down. In Russia, the crack troops rescued hundreds of hostages, leaving only a fraction dead (though too big a fraction, nearly a hundred, at latest count). All of the children survived. In America, however, only a few of the people in the compound escaped. All of the children died.
Further, in Russia, the people holding the hostages had proclaimed themselves a suicide death squad.
In America, the people holding the hostages were... the parents and friends of the hostages, if you believe the U.S. government. And they had made no declaration to harm anyone before the troops had arrived. Embarassingly, it was the U.S. government that initiated the fighting at Waco, and did so in grossly unprofessional ways. The whole thing was such a mess that the later siege and standoff looked an awful lot like the FBI was the terrorist, and the cultists in the compound the hostage to the red-faced bureaus of the federal government.
All in all, if one judges these things by a numbers game, the Russian government comes off a whole lot better than does the American. The Russian government saved more hostages, and it didn't start the whole mess to begin with.
On a wider view, of course, the terrorists in Moscow had not exactly started it,
did they? When one considers the war in Chechnya, the Russian government does not come across quite so blameless. The Russians have been fighting to keep the Chechens within their borders for a long time. The Russians have brooked no secession, and have carried on a bitter war to suppress the Chechen independence movement.
This does not excuse the Chechen terrorists for their sacrificing of innocents. But turnabout is fair play, and it is equally true that their desperate actions do not excuse what Russia has done and will continue to do in Chechnya.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government has found itself with even more blood on its hands — in a sense, this blood. In the course of over-reacting to the 9/11 disaster — fighting a war against terrorism
rather than a war against a particular terrorist network — America has taken what allies it could get, and Putin was more than willing to take the high road
and join the American war against terrorism, thereby making Russia's bloody terror campaigns in Chechnya look all that much more noble. The rebels, you see, are just terrorists.
It's amazing, though, how often one can breed the enemies one declares. Claiming the Chechens terrorists, a few then truly become terrorists. It was not in their interest to do so, but they were desperate, and they hoped to make a point.
Thus the politics of warfare.
And this does not bode well for America's war against terrorism.
Will America, too, simply breed more terrorists in the course of its bombings, blockades, and regime changes
?
At the root of all this is human nature.
Seeing injustice, the human animal strikes back. Unfortunately, the reaction often shows no more justice than the vile crimes that sparked the return strike. In this way, injustice breeds injustice, and the escalating violence of the feud
can seem inescapable.
The enduring lesson of civilization is that this pattern of hasty and impassioned violence must be reined in. Civilized people strive to restrain the human passions so that over-reaction is not the common course when barbarism breaks out. Civilized people embrace a rule of law and a carefully watched police force.
Uncivilized people, by definition, are committed to spectacular violence and an unthinking choice of targets.
These days, most civilized people are alarmed by terrorism, which we see as an extravagant and unjust lashing out. All civilized people have an interest in suppressing
terrorism, in restraining dissidents from striking out at innocents, using the terror of random acts of brutality to influence the policies of governments and whole peoples.
But in all the talk about fighting a war against terrorism,
the danger is twofold:
over-reactionsand violence.
Americans, the bulk of whom know violence in only personal and sportive contexts, too often forget the dangers inherent in the kind of hasty warfare that our leaders since World War II have been too prone to engage in.
And Americans, innocent of thought or history, too often forget that any group can resort to terrorism. It may be true that those with the weakest voices, the most hopeless causes, most often resort to terror as a mode of persuasion.
But it is well known that governments, too, use terror as a means to vanquish their enemies. For instance, the bombing of non-military targets in warfare is often explictly a form of terrorism, an example of psychological warfare.
Powerful nations often quell weaker nations with unrestrained force. The rule of the mighty is often nothing but a form of terrorism.
This kind of analysis not really all that common, and too commonly confined to the narrow domains of that mythical beast, the market.
Markets are not the whole of reality, nor the whole even of peaceful society. And the State — which is a beast that is somewhat less mythical — continues on, lumbering towards Armageddon, risking everything to display the wills to power of a leaders who fear, above all else, that they may someday have to give it up without having made their mark.
So many innocent people dying, and so few shudders. In Russia they mourn their loss. But here, in America, we should, if not mourn, at least feel the shudder as life passes from existence, and as we are drawn into the wiles of men who murder to maintain — and obtain — power.
I see no end in sight for the war on terrorism. But that hasty headline in The Moscow Times presents me with a new worry. Pehaps there is an end close at hand; perhaps it is horrible. The mark of the beast is the human stain of men for whom there is no kill like overkill, who are prone to over-react, who are too ready to risk too many innocent lives. The terrible truth is that these men are not simply terrorists.
They are statesmen, too. And they are not only tragic imperialists such as Putin. They are functionaries of our own government. They reside in the BATF and the FBI, they walk the halls of the Pentagon, and they sit in plush chairs in the White House.
In all the talk about terrorism, there has been too much talk of striking back
and fighting,
and not enough talk of preventing the injustices that nudge others to cross the line and cease acting as civilized men and women.
In other words, the rule of law gets lost, and our government, a dangerous servant and a fearsome master, slouches towards an end we may only know when it is too late.
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