Russian Hostage Crisis Not Over
Commandos had stormed the Beslan school earlier Friday and battled terrorists holding hundreds of hostages as crying children ? some naked and covered in blood ? fled through explosions and gunfire.
I’m not sure I know how to express my feelings about this. Pretty much any invective would be appropriate to describe the people who took these children hostage. And almost as though to make sure there was no question of how evil they were, it seems that the terrorists “opened fire on hostages as they fled the building”.
They shot at children running away? How?
I believe this is the only way to deal with terrorists – to refuse to deal with them. Estimates are that there are 150 or so dead. And that’s a far smaller number than the amount that would have died in many other possible scenarios. I also believe that this tough approach to terrorism will net far fewer deaths than the alternative. If a handful of men and women can storm a school and win concessions from the government, then there’s quite an incentive for, well, handfuls of men and women to storm schools and take children hostages.
Terrorism can never become a viable option for people discontent with the status quo. There are presumably more than a few people discontent with the status quo, and it’s not as though terrorism is exactly _difficult_. There’s not much skill to making bombs and blowing stuff up. Any moron can get a gun and take a room full of hostages. In the USA, _teenagers_ have been spectacularly successful at this. It’s not very challenging. That’s why it must never succeed in accomplishing any political objective.
I can sort of understand the stuff in Iraq. It’s one thing to put a bomb on a road and kill soldiers and policemen. I can understand Palestinian attacks on military checkpoints. It’s evil, but I can kind of understand. But killing civilians, and particularly _kids_ – that’s just incomprehensible.
Steven Den Beste has called this World War 4 (WW3 having been Democracy vs Communism, aka the Cold War) and I think he is right. We are fighting a single war. This is one fight against one enemy. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is part of that war. The Russia/Chechnya fight is too. We have to understand the the “War on Terror” is _not_ a metaphor. And we will win.
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