RUSSIA is desperate to equate the Beslan hostages in North Ossetia with the victims of 9/11 in New York. President Putin wants the United Nations to label Chechen terrorism as “international”. He wants to globalise his self-created internal menace. He wants the West to share his suffering and excuse his mistakes.
By mistakes, of course, we mean yet more counter-productive brutality. Mr Putin hopes that when the West is dropping bombs on Fallujah, it can hardly object to bombs on Grozny or corpses in Beslan. When the West is pursuing a policy of military repression of terrorism in Iraq, it can hardly plead against the same in Chechnya.
Terrorism today is close to supplanting both conventional war and nuclear deterrence as the world’s prime means of power projection. Russia has suffered three “defeats” in a week. Yesterday I heard a Muscovite saying it was “no longer safe to fly, use the Metro, go to the theatre or send children to school”. She was repeating what we heard countless times after 9/11 in New York. No matter that terrorism is the least of the threats facing today’s Muscovites. The headlines say otherwise. That is terrorism.
The West has not yet found a remotely adequate response to this weapon. The Republican convention in New York shows that it now holds the world’s most powerful state in thrall. President Bush even admitted last week that “this war” might never be won, surely the first time in history when a putative victor admits defeat in advance.
In consequence, American liberal democracy scarcely knows itself. Habeas corpus is suspended. A presidential election is held under the aura of war. The American soldier abroad is no more a figure of jocular affection but rather a Tolkien Orc, an armoured monster spewing indiscriminate death.
Britain meanwhile has become a mercenary of the American Right. Next month its Government will pass a “war powers” Civil Contingencies Bill so obessively illiberal I imagine few MPs will dare to read it before nodding it through. Iraq has reduced the British Parliament to the status of a Soviet Duma.
Terrorism is a weapon that feasts on its own suppression. Mr Putin’s hamfisted handling of Chechnya has given a regular blood transfusion to Chechen extremists over the past five years. He has recruited every daredevil and fanatic to an enemy that needs such recruits. The Americans have done likewise in Iraq. Conventional power seems trapped by its own counter-productivity.
One reason is that governments which respond to terror as do Mr Putin and Mr Bush are loved by their publics. Mr Putin has built his powerbase on the ruthlessness of his Chechnya policy, as Stalin did on kulak repression. He knows that a bloodbath in Beslan will do him no harm. Mr Bush likewise draws strength by portraying John Kerry as likely to appease the global monster of terror. Since these are battles in which there is neither victory nor defeat, the public is gorged instead on a diet of retaliatory bloodfests. The BBC has even announced that “terrorism drama” is to be this winter’s chief viewing fare. Osama bin Laden must be delighted.
I can imagine nothing more ghastly than an eternal war in which evil-doers feast on the mistakes of those in power, and in which those in power do so too. Small wonder that Conrad could pessimistically imagine that “the life-history of the Earth must...be one of relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone.” Just when the West has conquered communism, it craves a new and potent enemy. It almost takes comfort in the car bomber. As Conrad said, both terrorist and policeman suck at the same breast, that of public fear.
International terror is not an “ism”. It is a criminal tactic of publicity-seeking for a cause, one to which the West seems astonishingly vulnerable. Like a nuclear reaction, it catalyses a tiny explosion into a massive one. It does so because democracy feeds it fissile material, repression, publicity, martyrdom and the pornography of fear. Like the judo fighter, the terrorist need only use his opponent’s weight to fell him.
Insecure leaders make their enemies into heroes. Only a Caligula needs a victory a day to cling to power. In America in the 1950s, police forces unable to defeat petty gangsterism invented “the mafia” as a singular noun, as a nationwide conspiracy of secret power. Thus they explained their failures and justified their budgets. It was a romantic invention that no amount of contrary evidence has been able to dent. Likewise the exaggeration of Soviet power served to line the pockets of what Eisenhower said was a self-sustaining “military-industrial complex”.
The same phenomenon is enveloping international terrorism. Everyone from gunmakers to think-tanks has a vested interest in boosting its status and its menace, in suggesting ludicrously that such criminals can undermine the West’s way of life. Terrorism must be global and devastating, or how else will presidents and prime ministers win re-election? Moscow must be facing an international foe or how else will Mr Putin excuse the chaos in Chechnya?
This is weakness, not strength. It gives in to terror. It concedes its language and its terms of engagement. In the Middle East and Iraq, America and its allies offer terrorists the martyrdom that they seek, killing their families and bombing their communities. Sympathisers are imprisoned without trial. Back home the propellant of terror — public opinion — is fed constant threats and restriction of liberty.
Such weakness is flagrant appeasement. It flatters the terrorist with obsessive security across two continents. Spending on arms, guards, fortifications and insurance soars. Wars are fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet billions of dollars have not sprung bin Laden from the Pashtun heartlands and have made Iraq the most lawless place on earth. The condottieri of terror are celebrated on T-shirts across half the globe. No sane person can maintain that the world is safer as a result.
So what is the “strong” response? Of course when battle is joined it means not conceding terror its demands, whether the issue is a Chechen prisoner or a hijab in French schools. But it treats such battles as sick incidents, symptoms of a disease whose cure lies in grievances and conflicts that no war can solve, only politics. Mr Bush is right that such criminals may never be beaten. He did not add that this will apply only as long as the causes that sponsor them remain alive. That, after all, is the message that the West is pressing on Mr Putin in Chechnya, as it ignores the same message in the Middle East and Iraq. How much clearer are the failings of others!
Making Moscow loved in Grozny is the really strong response to terror in Beslan, as strong as setting out to make America loved not hated across the Arab world. But that is a task for bold and subtle statesmanship, not for soldiers. Terrorists must not be portrayed as crusaders set on global domination but as guns for hire and nothing else. It is their causes that yearn for resolution, and that is seldom susceptible to military force.
Dealing with criminals, however fanatical, is a matter for the police and security services. It is for meticulous intelligence and liaison, not the generation of war hysteria. I have no problem in an agent killing a gangster before he can kill me. I accept that suicide bombing may demand a measure of pre-emptive security, even some shift in the terms of criminal trade. But a bomber will always get through sooner or later. Londoners know that well enough. When it happens the victims must be regarded as those of any tragic accident, as desperately unlucky. Their fate cannot justify unhingeing democracy or invoking the apocalyptic horsemen.
The truth is that really getting tough on terror is boring. Appeasing it with notoriety and talk of war is spectacular and popular. That is the biggest risk of all.
simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
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