Al Quaeda in Beslan?

On the Al Qaeda connection, see the interesting interview, before the massacre, in L’humanite with Jacques Sapir, at this link:
http://www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/2004-09-04/2004-09-04-399895

And ponder what it means that both the present and past Russian presidents, and our own dangerously incompetent US president, have failed ignominously in the last three years to deal with “la nébuleuse d’al Qaeda.” For the Russians, that Yeltsin and Putin have been major war criminals, on par with Milosovic, has made little difference in defending Russia. For the U.S., besides giving Pakistan’s dictator a perverse incentive to both preserve the Al Qaeda leadership and bag, ocassionally, the stray cadre, the policy has seemed pretty much unchanged from before 9/11. Move al qaeda to a new sanctuary and pretend you’ve taken care of the problem. “Not with a bang but a whimper’ – T.S. Eliot seems to be ahead so far on that prediction.

I think there are 3 other reasons why the Russians are reluctant to give iindependence.

Firstly, there’s a whole host of reliogously mixed states next door which might then embark on similar independence movements – ossetia etc.

Secondly, Chechyna is probably not a very viable sate and hence would likely become a haven for all kinds of crimnal activities. Hence it may be better to have it within your control as opposed to spilling over.

Thirdly, the Chechens have probably been so radicalised, that even independence wont stop them Attacking Russia. Although there may have been Arabs involved today, its worth bearing in mind that the flow has apparently been two way in the past – with Chechens making it to Middle eastern / euorpean conflicts. so again the russian probably doubt that independence will be the end of it.

D^2 rocks.

Hey, wasn’t bin Laden a mercenary in Afghanistan fighting on “our” side against Russia? It would seem a no brainer to associate him and another anti-Russian group. A shared enemy and more training for the troops and the honing of tactics.

I do think the issue of religion is mostly a red herring, though. Given what we’ve seen from fundamental religious types of any faith, it’s pretty clear that any belief will do. It’s a property of all religions, not just any specific religion. It seems pretty hard to defend the position that Islam is somehow unique, other than the coincidence of repressed people and their dominant religion.

But one of the first order solutions to the whole problem is to have Putin seriously sit down and really negotiate with Chechnya. There’s got to be a solution there if Putin really wanted it. Russia is just being stubborn and it’s a cycle.

My own personal belief (using admitedly simple heuristics) is that serious negotiation in these things by applying serious diplomatic pressure on all sides (and hey, what about those arms sales world wide?) is always the winning strategy.

Seriously working on cleaning up the regional conflicts seems like the only serious long term strategy for winning the WOT. Without these petri dishes, you’re not creating more than you’re killing and you at least stand a chance in this struggle.

Leaving aside the big questions of global terrorism, the more pragmatic one — why in God’s name are the Russian Special Forces so pathetic at these siege situations? The Greeks were practicing for just this kind of thing before the Athens Olympics. Obviously suicidal hostage takers raises the bar a lot, but that’s not an unknown quantity these days. Some elementary principles of handling a siege were never implemented here. From the TV coverage it’s clear that the school was never properly secured, lots of locals running around with guns amidst the security forces. Can’t Putin pick up the phone and ask for help? He was a summit with Chirac and Schroder right before this happened.

How do they know they were from “from Arab countries”.

Not saying they weren’t, but I’m skeptical about early news reports.

I got this way after the fourth time Saddam was killed.

While Putin’s decision to move troops back into Chechnya was undoubtedly motivated by thoughts of the presidential election, it’s worth remembering the 1999 crisis in Dagestan which provided the springboard for that operation. So there’s a perceived domino theory that if Chechya gains any true autonomy, Dagestan will follow, and you’ll have yet another Caucasian powderkeg between the Russian border and the Middle East.

But Chechnya during the 1990s was like Afghanistan during the 80s, in terms of its capacity to serve as a crucible for terrorism; and the indiscriminate use of artillery bombardments and arbitrary execution on the part of the Russians only serves to exacerbate that. But as ‘Lenin’ says, there ain’t no cameras there.

Treating Chechnya as a naughty child in need of severe discipline was the making of Putin; he’s not going to back down from that position.

The Czars conquered Chechnya in the 19th Century. Over and beyond religious considerations, that fact probably has something to do with the unhappiness of its inhabitants with Putin et. al. For that matter, a lot of the opposition to our occupation of Iraq has secular motives. What’s with this blame everything on the unchangingly evil essence of Islam bit? How would that be different than blaming everything on the unchanginly evil essence of the Slavs?

The Russian treatment of Chechens was and is abysmal. Nevertheless, the only way to defeat terrorism is to show, by example after example, that terrorism cannot advance and can only retard the causes its practitioners espouse. Furthermore, this incident is just another example of what kind of state an independent Chechnya would be. It’s time the world informed the Chechens that if they want independence, autonomy, or even a the slightest amount of sympathy from anyone in the West, they better take to the streets in large numbers and shout “not in our name.” And they better do it pronto.

4% of the British population gathered in London to protest the Iraq war, and Blair went ahead with it anyway. Why is your suggestion going to be be any more successful?
Basically what you are saying is that the Chechens should unilaterally give up, which is (a) stupid, and (b) ain’t gonna happen.

This is why looking at this business in the terms you describe is pointless. Far more fruitful is, as people have suggested, starting negotiations. Of course the negotiations will be slow, of course bad things will happen while they proceed, of course the chechens will get at least some of what they want (otherwise why the heck would the stop fighting?) But what’s the goal here — to stop the fighting, or to prove some vague principal that violence won’t work, because there hasn’t been a case yet where this would-be-lesson has actually had much effect on changing the minds of the oppressed population.

It’s really sad to see people learn absolutely nothing from history.

Responding to d^2’s specific:

2) Should we expect, going forward, that all other conflicts involving Muslims on one side will be similarly compromised, and what should policy-makers do differently because of this?

I think we should expect certain conflicts involving to be similarly appropriated, where regional circumstances make it easy to do so; but to be appropriated in different ways in other situations.

I’ve yet to hear of any foreign element in the ethnic conflicts in Nigeria (although Jane’s suggests that such a situation might be developing); nor have I heard any serious claims of al-Qaeda involvement in the Uighur insurgence, in spite of China’s politically-expedient claims to the contrary.

I’m not sure if one can draw any coherent conclusions from this, though. On the one hand, we’ve seen the physical appropriation of regional conflicts, dating back to Afghanistan, in which foreign jihadis pursued (or strove to create) the latest battlefield; on the other hand, we’ve seen the ideological appropriation of regional conflicts, in places such as the Philippines and Indonesia.

So if, as people like Jason Burke have said, al-Qaeda has turned from a ‘venture capital’ model to a propagandist model, we may see a ‘BinLadenist’ turn in the ideology of ethnic conflicts without there necessarily being foreign fighters on the ground.

Burke’s final point seems relevant here, so I’m going to quote it:

if countries are to win the war on terror, they must eradicate enemies without creating new ones. They also need to deny those militants with whom negotiation is impossible the support of local populations. Such support assists and, in the minds of the militants, morally legitimizes their actions.

In Chechnya, the damage was done in the first half of the 90s, after the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the breakup of the USSR. (Tangentially, I don’t believe there was a foreign element to the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict, and one hopes that there doesn’t become one in the future.)

The United States decisively defeated Japan with nuclear weapons. Isn’t it a bit anachronistic to suppose this or any other struggle could be ended with less than annihilation?

This is, of course, a joke, but in general the only final solutions are of the form “the only good X is a dead X”.

Maynard: hey, what I’m advocating is a lot more sensible than whatever Vlad Putin is cooking up as we speak. All I’m saying is the Chechens should be subjected to a setback in response to this incident. It doesn’t have to be severe. It just has to be a net setback.

What could possibly be done to the average Chechen that has not been tried already?

First, let me say I’m happy to see a large amount of reasonable, fairly well informed discussion here. Very good! Now, a bit of disagrement on ignoring context again, w/ a random example- Angry Moderate: It’s true that Chechnya degenerated into a criminal haven in the late 90’s, but at least some of this is due to Russia fulfilling _none_ of its obligations to help re-build the country after the 1st Chechen war, which was a part of the peace agreements. It’s not all Russia’s fault, of course, but they did none of what they were required to do, which would have helped. Two, it’s really not so obvious that there was a “chechen” invasion of Russian territory in ’99 in a very deep sense of the term. First, the “invasion” of Dagastan (one village) was lead by Khatab, who was Jordanian, not Chechen. Two, there is quite good reason to think that people like Boris Berezovsky (shamefully given asylum in England) were the real movers behind this, and that even w/ the apartment bombings that elements of the government knew what was happening. (I lived in Ryazan, home of the imfamous FSB “practice bomb” at the time, so I take that part a bit personally.) Again, I’m not trying to cast off blame, just saying that the real complexity of the situation needs to be kept in mind.

The real Beslan story is misreable failure of the local and federal Russian authorities to deal with the crisis there.

Russia outraged by EU presidency comments on school raid

According to the Russian press, the terrorists had only one demand: public announcement of Putin ordering Russian troops out of Chechnia. No one tried to negotiate with them, the communication lines were cut off and then, finally, came this botched attack that killed, it sounds like, almost 500 people.

This is not Russian September 11, this is more like Russian April 19 – Waco.

It’s hard to get the facts about what happens in Iraq and even harder to get the truth about the Caucasus. On the one hand, keeping children without food or water for days (that seems to be the case) does not permit calm negotiation. On the other, a bloody death taking along 300+ civilians was probably what the killers wanted. Is it too much to ask that leaders of all religions condemn all hostage taking? Will American and European newspapers tell the public about the magnitude of human rights violations and atrocities in Chechyna in the last 10 years or will they merely say “Islamic terorrists kill again”?
Concerning lex and the much admired American military: journalists don’t comment on the evolution of “no-American zones” in Iraq, in Sadr City, Bequba, Fallouja, Najaf, and maybe more- places where Americans can’t go except in tanks or APCs. Probably most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam. They expected the US to provide order, security and electricity- that’s why there were none of these no American zones in January 2004. The longer that we remain, the more that there will be, and the more that Iraqi teenagers will feel tempted to kill Americans and coalition forces. On April 1, 2003 the US had less than 200 Arabic speakers in iraq and allowed looting of weapons dumps. Electricity is still a mess. This is an outfit to admire? The US military stepped on the snake, didn’t kill it, and didn’t treat it right after stepping on it. Bush and Putin are war criminals, bunglers and fanatics who don’t understand that tactics which worked in the stone age don’t work in our overcrowded and interdependent modern world.

3) What the hell has gone wrong with the particular strain of Islam which apparently tells people it’s OK to kill children, and what can be done about it?

I reckon why we’re getting this strain of terrorism, and atrocity terrorism, is that a number of people reckons it works.

Some author I read a few years back made the point that the Palestinians, while in his view deserving of a nation of their own, were no more deserving than other groups, like the Kurds or the Tibetans, but their conflict has the attention of the world, and a large number of people condemn the Israelis in terms not applied to Turkey or China. And he linked this to the Palestinians’ use of terrorism. The Palestinians kill Israelis, the Israeli government reacts and kills more Palestinians, and the Palestinians get a lot of sympathy and pressure put on Israel, that doesn’t go to the Kurds or other groups. So, other people struggling for something around the world see this, and some of them think “okay, killing children is worth it”.

Whatever you think about who’s right or wrong in the Palestine/Israel conflict, it’s an interesting point. We’re getting terrorism because it’s rewarded.

What’s with this blame everything on the unchangingly evil essence of Islam bit? How would that be different than blaming everything on the unchanginly evil essence of the Slavs?

There’s a *BIG* difference. For one, being slavic (or whatever ethnicity) is a genetic thing; being Islamic is a belief system. Yes, *most* people of places like Iran are Islamic states, and others like Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, etc are comprised of a vast majority of Muslim people. But that doesn’t mean (despite the claims of the radical Muslims) that to be an Iranian, for example, is to *be* a Muslim.

Your statement is somewhat akin to someone 65 years ago saying “what’s the difference between being German and being a Nazi?” I think anyone here would say there’s something inherently evil in Nazi-ism. (And this isn’t to completely equate the concerns I have with the intrinsic nature of Islam to that of Nazi-ism…) But the parallel is that while *most* Germans sold out or were at least complicit to the Nazis, there isn’t anything inherent in their genes that accounted for the Nazi’s atrocities.

Same goes with Islam. It’s a belief system that preaches the conversion of others to itself. That part isn’t unusual for a belief system (religious or political), but unlike others that are religious in nature, Islam’s basic/fundamentalist form openly advocates killing those that get in the way (or even those that just don’t convert) as a deed worthy of high honor! And just like the Nazis had a small, active minority who “did the dirty work,” and a majority who looked the other way because it didn’t directly hurt (and possibly even benefitted) them; so many citizens of many predominantly Islamic countries are complicit or at least tolerant of Islamic fundamentalist groups who use terror to achieve their ends, largely because the other Muslims don’t tend to be targets, and the goals of the terrorists (more power and influence for Muslims) could actually benefit them financially and/or politically.

It may seem terribly altruistic to defend Islam as some wonderful, cultural thing that gets misunderstood. But you’d probably feel rather different if you lived in 1980’s Iran, 14th Century Turkey, or some other such place, unless you happened to be a Muslim. (Yes, other religions have had Inquisitions and the like; but again, that sort of thing isn’t part of the basic/original teachings of the faith of any other religion I’m aware of.)

Please pardon me: abb1 wrote the quote I attatched to my prior post

Kurdistan was never constituted as a state, and indeed, in the 1920s the Kurds in Turkey rallied to the cause of Ataturk’s republic. Tibet, for its part, was most unfortunately never recognized as a sovereign state.

Matt, let’s not take the “long historical view,” since we’re living in the 21st century, not the 14th. That is what’s extraordinary — and appalling — about modern Islamism, that its attitude toward infidels (convert them at the point of the sword or else murder them) is utterly medieval (or even pre-medieval), not just indifferent to humanism and the Enlightenment but actively hostile to them. If the best you can see in defense of modern Islam is that it’s no worse than 14th-century Christianity, it’s a sign of how fucked-up things are.

“What the hell has gone wrong with the particular strain of Islam which apparently tells people it’s OK to kill children, and what can be done about it?”

I think an equally important question is, “How big is this particular strain of Islam?”

At any rate, is there really a distinction, from the standpoint of moral condemnation, to be made between oppression of one’s own citizens and oppression of a foreign people? The legal and political ramifications are different, certainly, but is an act by an IDF soldier in Palestine morally different from an identical act by a Turkish soldier in the Kurdish region?

I think there is a distinction and it has to do with legal and political ramifications. Conflict between Turks and Kurds or Russians and Chechens is an internal conflict between citizens of the same country where both sides are trying to find feasible compromise. It’s a domestic dispute (and yes, these can turn very ugly, I agree).

But there is no reason whatsoever for an IDF soldier to oppress anyone outside Israel. Certainly not for 37 years. This is not a question of looking for a compromise. This is just wrong, plain and simple; there is no “on the other hand”.

Jonathan:

Except by Nepal.

Point.

At any rate, is there really a distinction, from the standpoint of moral condemnation, to be made between oppression of one’s own citizens and oppression of a foreign people? The legal and political ramifications are different, certainly, but is an act by an IDF soldier in Palestine morally different from an identical act by a Turkish soldier in the Kurdish region?

Depends on which part of the Kurdish region. If in Turkey, not particularly. If in Iraq, yes.

Not that this logic-chopping actually matters, of course.

Conflict between Turks and Kurds or Russians and Chechens is an internal conflict between citizens of the same country where both sides are trying to find feasible compromise. It’s a domestic dispute

These conflicts, and other conflicts involving independence movements, are “domestic disputes” only in the sense that they are occurring within current political borders. In fact, they are disputes between competing nationalisms – conflicts between existing states and states-in-being.

A real domestic dispute is one, like the anti-apartheid struggle in ZA, where all sides want to be part of the same country at the end of the day and the conflict concerns the shape that country should take. It isn’t a domestic dispute when one side no longer wants to be domesticated.

But there is no reason whatsoever for an IDF soldier to oppress anyone outside Israel.

I’m not sure the reason is all that different from the Turkish case or from any similar conflict. Turkey, Russia et. al. are facing insurgency threats from inside their borders, while Israel faces such a threat from outside its borders (and did so well before 1967 – witness the fedayeen infiltrations of the 1950s and early 1960s). The Israeli response (and, for that matter, the Rwandan response) to cross-border infiltration mirrors the Turkish and Russian responses to domestic insurgency.

I hold no brief for Israeli policies in the occupied territories and I think it’s past time for Israel to get the hell out. At the same time, the mixed security-nationalist motivations of these policies aren’t materially different from what motivates the Turks or Russians, and Chechen or Kurdish national movements aren’t materially different from Palestinian nationalism. Conflicts can’t be contained so neatly within borders on a political map, nor is the moral right to self-determination contingent upon it fitting within existing political boundaries.

Matt, let’s not take the “long historical view,” since we’re living in the 21st century, not the 14th. That is what’s extraordinary — and appalling — about modern Islamism, that its attitude toward infidels (convert them at the point of the sword or else murder them) is utterly medieval (or even pre-medieval), not just indifferent to humanism and the Enlightenment but actively hostile to them.

But Steve, one can’t ignore history and pretend that Al-Quaeda was, as someone suggests above “created out of pure evil by a capricious act of God”. The reason why I don’t believe in “Islamism” as a useful category is that this form of Islam hasn’t taken root in material form in Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, or most of Muslim Africa. It seems to me that it has mainly appeared in places where Muslims believe that they have been given a bad deal by non-Muslims during the 20th century, mainly because of people who wanted their oil.

When you’re talking about “Islamism”, you’re talking about a purely Arab phenomenon which isn’t even common to all Arab states. It makes more sense to me to talk about Al-Quaeda specifically and to stop pretending that any and every conflict with Muslims on one side of it is related.

Daniel, I confess I’m perplexed by your reasoning. Islamism doesn’t mean “Islam,” at least to me, so the fact that there are Islamic societies — let alone individual Muslims — where Islamist ideology has little purchase is not especially surprising, nor is it proof that something called “Islamism” doesn’t exist. The fact that Communist true believers were only common in some societies rather than others doesn’t mean that Communism didn’t exist.

I certainly find it plausible that Arab discontent — some of it geopolitical, some of it economic, some of it cultural — provided especially fertile ground for the seeds of Islamist ideology to bear fruit. But again, that doesn’t make Islamism a “fictional construct.” You’d hardly quarrel with the idea that historicizing something doesn’t prove it doesn’t exist.

As to the specific question of the relationship between Islam and Islamism, I think it’s clear that Islam — with its explicit textual endorsement of violence against unbelievers, its lack of a meaningful humanist tradition, etc. — is well-tailored as a religion to serve as the foundation of a chiliastic movement. The interpretations of Islam that people like Qaradawi and the Iranian mullahs offer are not implausible, nor are they unfaithful to the Koran. But again this doesn’t mean that Muslims have to become Islamists. It means that you don’t have to do a lot of ideological work to offer a convincing Islamist take on the world to someone who’s already a believing Muslim. I also think that while ideologies have material roots, they also obviously take on lives of their own. Ideas do have power in and of themselves.

The real crux of the matter is that isn’t just about al-Qaeda. Mohammed Atta was extreme in his willingness to kill and die, but in terms of his basic beliefs — about the US, Israel, women, the Egyptian state, sharia, Western liberalism — I don’t think he was qualitatively different from someone like Qaradawi or, even scarier, from tens of millions of young men all through the Middle East and the subcontinent. That’s why it makes sense to talk about Islamism, because this isn’t about a single terrorist group or network. It’s about an ideology and a movement.

Jonathan,
In fact, they are disputes between competing nationalisms – conflicts between existing states and states-in-being.

No, I don’t think so. Sure, these conflicts may cause a break-up eventually and then it’ll be a different situation. However, as long as the Turkish Kurds still are citizens of Turkey, they still have a stake in the country’s future (the Nuremberg laws is a good illustration of how this matters). The conflict, then, is not between the Kurdish region and the rest of Turkey but between Turkey and a political group inside Turkey; i.e.: there must be a significant number of Kurds in the region (perhaps a majority) who are not separatists. No matter how you look at it – it’s an internal political dispute turned ugly. Not so with an occupation – it’s a pure form of oppression.

…Israel faces such a threat from outside its borders…

Necessity to defend your borders is a given, no matter how much territory you occupy around your country you’ll still have borders to protect.

Excellent questions in the first post, which should probably be reposted when we’re all slightly less horrified and numbed by the photos coming out of Russia. First stabs at answers:

1) Ought people with the power to do something abut Chechnya to take a different attitude to the question of Chechen independence because of this?

Emphatically no, for many reasons. Three such reasons:
One, claims of ‘moral equivalence- all sides are equally guilty’ are garbage EXCEPT when evidence exists to indicate that all sides are indeed using the same tactics. Such evidence abounds in the case of Chechnya- as noted above, every Western foreign correspondent or human rights investigator to have come out of Chechnya reports the same things: a Russian army entirely unlimited in its use of terror tactics against civilians, the rape of Chechen women by Russian troops on such a scale as to strongly suggest deliberate orders or at the very least a ‘blind eye’ policy, the levelling of Chechen villages and towns by Russian firepower. The Russian troops and the Chechen rebels are morally equivalent, and the reason we do not have the TV photos to remind us is that being a cameraman in Chechnya is both suicidally dangerous and not something editors are willing to pay for.

Second, there is strong reason to believe that Russia is fighting this war for no vital national interests, whereas a deal on the lines of the Tatarstan compromise of ’94 or the Lebed-brokered Chechen deal of ’96 would be accepted- and would, furthermore, have a strong tendency to lead the Chechen population away from support of the grotesque tactics and Wah’habi ideology of the current rebel leadership. States, or autonomous regions, have an interest in maintaining some form of stability and peace- States do not want Wah’habi thugs terrorising their neighbours, and the neighbours responding by bombing bridges and power stations. Rebel leaders, on the other hand, thrive on the violence and despair of the kind currently prevailing in Chechnya.

Third, moving on from the above, there is abundant evidence that every further year of the war has led to the leadership and rank and file of the Chechen rebellion becoming more and more radically Islamist. Early reports of the Chechen leadership in ’94 and ’95- eg in Carlotta Gall and Tim De Waal, ‘Chechnya: A short Victorious war’- state that they were essentially nationalists, fuelled by grievances against Moscow, and dreams of oil riches and power, and that their behaviour and rhetoric was hardly Muslim at all. The first reports of Sharia law imposed by rebels date from ’95, and since then the ultra-Islamic tendency in the rebellion first became more prominent and now seems to dominate. There must be all sorts of dynamic going on that can explain this- the provision of weapons and military instruction from Bin Ladenite groups, the provision of money from Gulf Wah’habis, the need for an extreme ideology to motivate fighters outgunned by one of the world’s biggest armies- but the point is that all of these ‘Islamising’ dynamics will continue if the war continues, but may be reduced if the war is ended.

‘3) What the hell has gone wrong with the particular strain of Islam which apparently tells people it’s OK to kill children, and what can be done about it?’

Anybody who does this is morally degenerate. And there does seem to be a hell of a lot of such degenerates But the Serbs who carried out the Srebrenica and other massacres were such degenerates, and so are the Russian soldiers having so much fun in Chechnya. I think the metaphysical contemplation of evil is not going to get us very far. We should fight against evil people using the most appropriate tactics in every case. We should certainly lose our fear of criticising the practices of Muslim states and groups because it might ‘damage community relations’ or because ‘it’s their culture’, and start calling spades spades, murder murder, and perverse, misogynistic, religiously-bigoted reactionary states like Saudi Arabia…you get the idea. Over-used Nietzsche phrase coming up: such fighting, and such honesty, will only be successful if in fighting monsters we do not ourselves become monsters.

The best response I’ve read yet to the Beslan horror is David Aaronovitch’s piece in the Guardian.

Those who say Russia should have handled the school massacre better are missing the wider point

Find it at: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1297537,00.html

“And strategically, it is in our vital interests to prove both to the Muslim populations of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, and to our own Muslim immigrant populations, that we do indeed believe in democracy and human rights and will not stop defending them because of a bunch of mass-murdering thugs slaughtering school children.”

There’s one problem with that. Democracy and human rights are not the same thing and are not inseparable. They don’t really belong in a single phrase said on a single breath like that, as if the one entailed the other, as if indeed the one guaranteed the other. Sometimes (in fact, tragically, quite often) the very opposite is the case. Sometimes there is a democratic majority that wants to take away the human rights of a minority – or even a majority, such as women.

It’s important always to keep that alarming fact in mind.

Daniel, of course Islamists come in all sorts of stripes, the way Communists did, or, for that matter, democratic capitalists do. But even with that variety, there are fundamental commonalities between the belief systems of Islamists in the Phillipines, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria, etc. Not all these Islamists are interested in aggressively carrying the battle to the West, but all are hostile to the West, all hate Israel, all want to impose sharia throughout the Muslim world, all want to restrict women’s rights, and all believe that the Koran provides a template not merely for spiritual salvation, but for earthly rule as well. (Again, I’m not saying all Muslims believe these things, but that all Islamists do.)

Does this mean we have to go to war with all Islamists? No. The West didn’t go to war with the Soviet Union, even though our interests were irreversibly opposed, and even though the avowed goal of Communism was to transform the entire world. So as a matter of policy, it certainly makes sense to distinguish between those Islamists who constitute an active threat — because they are willing to carry the war to us — and those with whom we can use different tactics. But Western policy objectives don’t have anything to do with whether Islamism exists or not, as you seem to be implying. Islamism exists. The question is how to deal with it. (If you want to reduce my take on this to a soundbite formulation again, I think “people who don’t like us because they’re Muslim and we’re not” is better than “people we don’t like who are Muslim.”)

A classic example of this would be Iran. You say that Iran doesn’t have any ambition of fighting the West. Do you really believe this? Iran doesn’t have the ability to fight the West without being eradicated. But it seems hard to believe that the country which invented the phrase “the Great Satan” to describe the US doesn’t have ambitions of fighting the West. Iran may not be West-threatening, to use your formulation. But it’s undoubtedly West-hating. Again, that doesn’t mean we should go to war with Iran — which I think would be a complete disaster. But there’s no point in pretending Iran is anything other than actively hostile to us on ideological grounds.

As noted by Dsquared, there are contexts where Ophelia’s little lecture on the Tyranny of the Majority problem might make sense, but Chechnya isn’t one of them. There are grounds for believing that in much of the world increased democracy might lead to a poorer deal for women, but given the widespread agreement among human rights organisations that mass rape is among the activities of the Russian army in Chechnya, I can’t really see a feminist case for supporting Putin’s war.

We are still stunned here about events in Beslan

That actually wasn’t what I meant by my little lecture – though I can see why it read that way. Ah well, I’ll just keep my little mouth shut then and let the big people say their big things.

‘That actually wasn’t what I meant by my little lecture – though I can see why it read that way.’

If you write something that reads in a certain way, don’t then be offended if people do indeed read it in that precise way. A further point is that self-pity is just a little out of place where the topic under discussion is the violent death of a large number of civilians.

‘… we should never have backed this man Putin’s Chechen war.‘

Yeah well, were we, the voters of the western hemisphere, ever asked for our opinion on the matter? no, Dan, we, the people, woke one day to find out Putin was a great ally and a respectable political figure. Maybe even worth some of our tax money in aid or trade deals.

To paraphrase Ophelia Benson, we, the exporters of democracy, may have human rights, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have democracy.

In fact, I get the feeling, the more we try and ‘export democracy’, the more we end up importing bits and bobs of its opposite. Five years ago no one in the US or Europe would touch Putin with a pole. He was as palatable an ally as Milosevic (a dilettante in the fine art of firm retaliation, by comparison). And look at him now. He should be a little more grateful to those Chechen terrorists.

Breslan is Russia’s 9/11: a shock to the nation that exposes systemic failure and the urgent need for a radical policy departure.

In Russia’s case, that means thorough, sweeping reform of not just the security forces but also the state. Just as the Russo-Japanese debacle forced the end of tsarist autocracy in 1905, Breslan has forced Putin to admit systemic failure.

Read Putin’s speech to the nation carefully. Putin is openly admitting what every Russian knows is the root cause of not just the failure to suppress the Chechen bandits but also the pathetic collapse of a great power across nearly every sphere of political, social and economic life: the criminalization of the Russian state. Putin’s language may seem oblique to us but to the Russians he was crystal clear. This may signal a departure as bold as that represented by Gorby’s New Thinking.

For the US that should prompt us to propose a deep and strategic relationship with Russia, preferably in a larger regional context that includes a much deeper relationship with India and Turkey and of course Israel.

Iran’s impending attainment of nuclear capabilities, along with the complete farce that has been the Three EU Dwarves’ appeasement efforts there and France’s broadcasting to all and sundry that it sides with the jihadists against the US and a free Iraq, will hasten this diplomatic revolution.

In Bush’s second term Rumsfeld and Powell will be dispatched to Moscow, New Delhi and Ankara to begin the creation of a bloc of great powers in the region who grasp that the islamist threat is existential and that Iran must be boxed in using all means at our disposal.

The US will buy off Russia’s nuclear industry, offer training and assistance to the Russian military in Georgia, Chechnya and elsewhere.

We should also offer massive amounts– McKinsey estimates $100 billion’s needed– in private sector investment by our oil majors into Russia’s pathetically dilapidated oil infrastructure; a massive increase in money for nonproliferation assistance; and discounted medicine and drugs to help stem Russia’s health care crisis that will if unchecked cause the Russian population to shrink by as much as 25% during the next few decades.

Look east, Americans. Let NATO die a quiet death, ignore the EU dwarves and start developing deep and strategic relationships with nations that truly can help (and hurt) us in the effort to contain a nuclear Iran: Russia, India, Turkey, Israel.

Human rights can eventually guarantee democracy, but ignorant or cowed democracy (i.e. the tyranny of the majority or the most threatening) is no guarantor of human rights

Meaning? Seriously now, why does it have to be either democracy or human rights? Which democracy sanctions stoning of women? Which dictatorship has a great human rights record?

Yes, amazingly, it’s true, democracy and human rights are not exactly identical, like, big revelation, but they’re not opposites. Human rights are an integral part of the definition of a political order that is not autocratic. Human rights _include_ the right to vote and the right to a free press and the free expression of opinions, which altogether are some of the foundations for a democracy. So please, let’s just not abstract and reduce everything to binaries, just for the sake of polemics. The “tyranny of the majority” is a nice concept, but voting is not the by and end all of a democratic system. When there are legal principles and declarations are being adhered to, not even the most bloodthirsty nightmarish majority can vote for exterminating and torturing people.

No existing Islamic majority country is a fully functional democracy with full compliance with human rights, some of them are some of the worst dictatorships, why assume everyone in Iraq – or in Chechenya, or every Muslim in general, for that matter – must want theocratic repressive regimes in place of whatever degree of repression they already have? That’s the terrorists’ own propaganda, that they speak for a majority. I don’t see why this urge to fall for it.

Compare and contrast

Oh jeezuz… It’s called irony, Dan Hardie, it’s called sarcasm. Look ’em up.

If my understanding of the terms “twat” and “scat” is correct, Hannah, you may be a bit confused between back and front …

It’s human rights that are needed first and foremost in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Enforced, if necessary. Indeed, in the entire Middle East. (Right, me “and what army”, eh? Ok, if possible. As something to aim for.)

Two points:

1. Since it’s not possible, not even a little bit possible, what should we do instead?

2. Since by “if possible”, you mean “If it is possible to occupy an entire region with more than 110 million people living in it and force a form of government on them which the inhabitants do not want, by force of arms”, could you give us a ballpark figure of how many people per year you’d expect to be killing in service of this hope?

Basically, this is why I have so little patience with this point of view. It would indeed be wonderful if liberal human rights[1] could be enforced across the world by the direct intercession of Allah and a sudden change of heart on the part of all people everywhere. However, the choice we are actually faced with is whether or not they should be enforced by placing men with guns on the ground and killing people when they step out of line.

By the way, Hannah, I’ve got another bald comparison for you; the current Republican senatorial candidate for Oklahoma thinks that women who have abortions should be put to death. How many votes do you think he’s going to get?

If you don’t know that, you might want to read a little history. Hitler was elected, for a start.

Ophelia, thank you for that bit of news, I really really hadn’t heard of it before.

Didn’t Hitler turn into a dictator after being elected? his pal Mussolini was elected too. Once.

How can the nazis be a valid instance of how democracies can grossly violate human rights, when they weren’t even a democracy??

Besides, in the spirit of history recaps, it should also be noted that human rights were largely developed and legislated upon after that. The universal declaration of human rights dates 1948.

As for which democracy – Iran for one.

Wow, that’s news to me. That Iran is a democracy, that is, not that it violates human rights.

My point was (obviously!) not to say that dictatorship is preferable to democracy, but simply to say that democracy and human rights do not automatically go together – they have to be put together.

Yes, I got that. Nothing is automatic, not even walking. But you seem to forget that after 1948, international law which includes human rights relates very strictly to the definition of democracy.

You also seem to equate democracy with elections, when they’re just a part of it. Otherwise, even Saddam’s Iraq would have been democratic.

Democracy as the opposite of tyranny means satisfying a series of requirements that *do* include compliance with human rights like fair trial, free speech, free press, universal suffrage, etc. which simply are essential building blocks of any democracy. That is the “mechanism”.

Some areas might be more blurry – the death penalty is a violation of human rights, but it’s not a negation of democracy if it is in a functioning legal system (see the death penalty in the US vs in China).

Today, we do not normally describe as “democratic” a nation where the governing system _systematically_ violates human rights.

When Iraq holds elections it won’t still be democracy unless the other conditions – including many human rights, which are also political rights – are satisfied. And I still feel compelled to ask, where did the idea of the likelihood of a majority of Iraqis wanting to go straight from Saddam to Saudi Arabia come from?

‘It’s called irony…’ Indeed- of positively Wildean sophistication.

‘The one retorting to that of course was absolutely saturated with self-pity; naturally.’Ophelia, there may well be a time and a place for narcissism but this probably isn’t it.

‘Hitler was elected, for a start.’
No he wasn’t. Not on this planet, anyway. Do you actually want me to outline to you the process by which Hitler became Chancellor, up to and including the NSDAP’s failure to win a Reichstag majority, and the subsequent achievement of a Reichstag majority by such means as the illegal detention of KPD deputies and the armed SA thugs supervising the voting chambers, or will that bring more shrieks of ‘patronising, patronising’?

‘As for which democracy – Iran for one.’
I have trouble accepting the idea that a country in which the results of the last but one election were quite openly and comprehensively ignored by the Mullahs who actually run the place, and in which as a result the last election was comprehensively boycotted by the young who make up the bulk of Iran’s population, can be described as a democracy- but what the hell do I know? Ophelia will tell us, just as soon as she finishes catching up on her German history. Sorry Ophelia: can you provide me with a reference to one (1) reputable work of modern history or political science on contemporary Iran which describes that country without any massive qualification as ‘democratic’?

dsquared: except ‘enforcing human rights’ is not exactly the aim of any recent, current or future military intervention (or alliance, or trade deal, or foreign aid).

Ophelia, I have never heard of democracy referred to as anything other than liberal democracy, or constitutional democracy, or whatever you want to call it, in short, democracy _with_ human, legal, political rights. Not as a mere matter of holding elections, which, alone, are not a guarantee of anything, and everyone knows that. I’ve certainly never heard of Iran defined as democracy, or much less, of the nazis being a democracy just because Hitler was elected before he proceeded to install a dictatorial regime.

I don’t know which people you know for whom that’d be otherwise, but they sure are weird.

And again. Where are the masses of Iraqis clamouring to have elections just so they can vote measures by which their human rights can be violated again, before they’ve had a chance to actually enjoy them?

(I posted that before I saw anon’s post – crossed wires)

robin, yeah, I also posted before I saw the rest – I was starting to think I’d missed the news this week about Iran no longer being a theocratic dictatorship…

‘That a dictator, like Hitler, can get elected’

(Sigh)…But he *didn’t* get elected.

Yeah, well, Mussolini was. Milosevic, too.

Ophelia, as a last note, since you said that people including political leaders have that notion of democracy as mere elections:

http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/whatsdem/whatdm2.htm
esp. “the pillars of the democracy” at the end.

That is indeed what is meant, today, when speaking of democracy as opposed to tyrannies and repressive regimes. It is so obvious I would have never thought it needed pointing out.

The modern definition of democracy does incorporate human rights, and as well as having constitutions or laws recognising those rights, all modern democracies are also, additionally, signatories of the declaration of human rights as an international convention.

So it is really a bit stunning to claim this concept of democracy is my own arbitary construction. Or to portray democracy, not just elections, as a potential threat of human rights. Democracy is based on the rule of the majority, but the rule of the majority alone is _not_ democracy – a tyrannical majority gaining power and violating the political and human rights of the minority is quite simply a dictatorship. No matter if it arises out of, or incorporates, elections.

Dan, of course! I was playing devil’s advocate, don’t misunderstand me. I was arguing with Ophelia on that, obviously I’m not supporting her suggestion. My point is what I already wrote before.

Mussolini – yes, the march on Rome, but before that Italy was a democracy and Mussolini had been a player in a democracy, a member of parliament. It was gradual. It wasn’t a coup d’etat of the Pinochet kind (even if, in consequences, it was).

But take Milosevic as a better instance of what Ophelia was saying. It is true that even someone ascending to power through parliament and elections could then turn into a dictator – but there need to be other factors allowing that, and the use of “x dictator was elected” (nevermind how accurate and precise) is not in itself a warning that _democracy_ can become ‘tyranny of the majority’, because the moment it does that, it’s no longer democracy… Not to mention human rights are a post-WWII creation so there is no such dichotomy etc etc etc… I don’t even know for sure what Ophelia meant, it’s obviously absurd to imply a dictator had anything to do with democracy just because he may have been elected.

After reading a few of the comments I decided to post my opinion. This may be just an opionon of a former Chechnya resident but as an eyewitness to prior military breakdowns, I must say I am not surprised of current events. Back in 80’s it was known fact in Russia and Chechnya that Iraqis, not aware or educated enough about Al Quaeda at the time, were training in the mountains of Checheno Ingush republic. Giving freedom to Chechens is another story. First of all the current land that chechens reside in is a Russian land that was given to chechens and Ingushes after they were released from Siberia in the 50’s by Khrushchov. Even if they do get their independence I see how that would change their social status within the Russian republic, unless they flee to Arab countries where majority of them have relatives. The final thought is, that Chechens as a race have been and always will remain animals and I apologize for the generalization. They need to be stoped for once and for all and I feel that more drastic measures need to be taken, just like Stalin did by sending them to Siberia away from civilization. If I offended anyone’s feelings I apologize, but after losing a great part of my extended family, that race gets no simpaty from me

Much of this discussion is very interesting, but I think there is a very important point either missing altogether, or mentioned too rarely.

The hostage taking in Beslan CANNOT be interpreted in primitive “an eye for an eye” terms as revenge for the atrocities that have been committed by Russian troops in Chechnya. Firstly, the Ossetians that live in Beslan are ethnically NOT Russian. They are, on the other hand, armed, violent, fiercely protective of their children and have a history of conflict with nearby Ingushetia. All this implies that the attack in Beslan was indeed a strategic measure to destabilize the already tenuous peace in the region. The Ossetin population has already started to mobilize and the war is looming. Whether the attack was conducted in the name of independence of Chechnya or otherwise is largely immaterial. What is important is that certain people, in order to attain their possibly lofty and commendable goals, have consciously resorted to torture and killing of children.

P.S.: Stalin did indeed order the relocations of Chechens en masse to Siberia. However, apart from the fact that Stalin is not Russian, he also relocated Tartars, Jews, Russian Germans and many other ethnicities. Likewise, he killed a lot of Russians. So the assertion that Chechens suffered uniquely under Stalin is simply untrue.

Dan, to clarify, I did not pay much attention to the historical accuracy of the claim that “x was elected too” because I was arguing with the point about elections / majority rule vs. human rights in the context of modern democracy, not with the example cited in itself. There are after all instances (ie., again, clearest recent instance, Slobodan Milosevic) of murderous tyrants who were first elected. Of course no matter what political and parliamentary route to power x dictator initially followed, the building of a dictatorship takes more than that, before and especially after. So I completely agree with you on the concept. I just didn’t want to get into a detailed debate on the accuracy of Ophelia’s statement because even if her assertion about x being elected was perfectly accurate, what she implied by that, on the potential conflict between democracy and human rights, wouldn’t.