"Root causes", again - a survey of opinion

Like everyone else, I spent the weekend in shocked incredulity at the pictures from Beslan. The image that stays with me is of the mother, at the moment of her discovery, burying her head in the chest of her dead son - of, I suppose, ten years old - who was himself lying alongside his dead brother.

What I also didn't expect, but ought to have done, was the views of a well-known source of isolationist quietism cited and aptly dismissed by David Aaronovitch in The Observer:

Yesterday, in the wake of the Beslan school horror, the historian Corelli Barnett more or less blamed the crisis on the war against terror itself. His thesis was that, since September 11th, the actions of the West (and particularly the Americans) had made things far, far worse.

The problem with this is the simple one that the war with terror was declared by terror itself. Declared in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, declared in New York on 11 September. It wasn't until 11 September, however, that we began to appreciate the scale of what was already happening. The idea that, had we negotiated with the Taliban, left Saddam in place and put more pressure on Sharon to settle, kids would now be safe in North Ossetia, is just wishful thinking.

Less serious but still dispiriting, Guardian letter-writers have busily adapted their script to another part of the world:

World leaders condemn the perpetrators of Beslan as "evil". But the siege hasn't come out of nowhere, but out of a war which the west has largely ignored. Between 1994 and 1996, the Russian army killed 80,000 Chechens and lost 14,000 of their own troops. The Russians suffered a humiliating defeat, but were back 1999. This phase of the conflict has left up to 50,000 Chechens dead, while 11,000 Russians have died; 230,000 Chechens (a third of the population) are refugees as a result of the war. None of this excuses the perpetrators of the siege. But before the tragedy of Beslan is smothered in cliches, we should understand its root causes.

Even after Beslan, then, there will be no bonfire of the verities. (You read it right, by the way: this correspondent disdains cliches but urges us to attend instead to "root causes".) Conversely the sane view is expressed succinctly in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal (link requires subscription):

Mr. Putin likes to hitch his wagon to America's global war on terror, often to disguise his heavy-handed but ineffective policies in Chechnya. But that doesn't change the worrying reality that Chechnya is exporting Islamic terror. French prosecutors claim Chechen-based groups were behind a foiled 2003 chemical attack. "What is not arguable is the fact that the most effective, violent and well-trained elements in Chechnya are indeed Islamists, part and parcel of the al Qaeda nebula, whose methods are imports from the Middle East," said Michael Radu of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. No one wants another Taliban-like state in Europe.

Surely, the answer isn't in sending more ill-prepared Russian conscripts in or bombing another Chechen village to the ground. The Kremlin might come up with a smarter, not a tougher, military strategy that puts the stress on results, starting with better intelligence.

Nor do Russian policies change the reality, as the Journal stresses, that the Beslan outrage is beyond conventional categories of evil. Yet Guardian letter-writers who can apply that term only with inverted commas are less pernicious, because more obviously uncomprehending, than those who will rhetorically acknowledge the evil but otherwise ignore that context when recounting their pressing political complaints. In his excellent blog, philosopher Jonathan Derbyshire neatly turns around a currently popular mutation of an otherwise unexceptionable principle:

... according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question. In one recurrent variant of this view, true statements about what, for shorthand purposes, I'll call "political Islamism" ought to be circumscribed, if not actually withheld, for fear of inciting "Islamophobia"....

[I]t seems to me obvious that the point applies in contexts different to the one in which it's usually applied over at Crooked Timber. So one wonders whether the Guardian might have been advised not to run today Madeleine Bunting's characteristically egregious and sophomoric piece on "Islamophobia" (these aren't scare quotes, by the way; they simply indicate that the term is the one used by the author). Bunting manages a passing nod to the "horrific barbarity of Beslan", but she has other, more pressing business to attend to.

In that article, Madeleine Bunting insists that she is in favour of "legitimate debate":

But the key criteria for that legitimate debate on Islam is [sic] that it must be rooted in knowledge. The majority of people in this country still have only the haziest, and often prejudiced, understanding of this religion, a 1,500-year-old ethical tradition with a huge range of interpretations across hundreds of cultures around the globe - and a lamentable lack of interest in putting that right.

Have I got news for her. The majority of people in this country have only the haziest, and often prejudiced, understanding of any religion, including Christianity and Judaism. I doubt that even most Guardian readers would be able to distinguish the Immaculate Conception from the Virgin Birth in Roman Catholic doctrine. That is unfortunate, but from the standpoint of public policy (other than in education) irrelevant. The "key criteria" of a liberal society are that it protects the civil rights of minorities, including their freedom of religion, speech and association, and in foreign policy upholds human rights disinterestedly. I have no competence to judge whether a moderate variant of Islam is theologically more orthodox than the political Islamist variant; I just want that moderate variant to be alongside the rest of us in combating Islamist totalitarianism.

Contrary to the preposterous claim (regularly aired by by Tony Benn, among many others) that President Bush has launched "what [he] called 'a crusade' against the Muslim world", the United States has, under successive Presidents, taken up arms in defence of Muslim populations: in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo and of course the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. President Bush has explicitly declared his support for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The reason the western democracies did these things (though I acknowledge the disgrace of the then British government's stance on Bosnia - a subject for another post), and were right to do them, was not to combat "Islamophobia" (like Jonathan Derbyshire, I use the inverted commas because I'm quoting), but to uphold the values that define us. It's those values, which we can't dispense with, that generate terrorism. Islamists oppose us not because of what we do, but because of what we are: secular, pluralist and tolerant. Revulsion at Russia's cruel and repressive policy towards Chechnya is an important principle; we should not tolerate for a moment its degeneration into the type of sophistry we have heard so much of in the past three years.