[DanaC]

Well.....Those tactics can have an effect. For instance, the people of Russia may after several of these appalling attacks put pressure on their government to pull the troops out of Chechnya. I would imagine that whilst many Russians will take a "hold firm and dont give in to terrorists stance" many others will just want the terrorism to end and as such may pressurise their government to effect the changes which will lead to an end of the violence.

As to whether or not it is ever justified to kill women and children well I really dont see a staggering amount of space between their acts and the bombing of hiroshima. The only difference is that the bombs were dropped by a state and these people are acting on their own. The whole point of this is that it is a target which a) is manageable with minimal military equipment ( which of course the chechens have) and requires no standing army or fully functioning state machinery ( which they do not have) and B) given that attempts to negotiate their independance have been met with overwhelming force and macho posturing by the russian state, an attack against it's military would be dangerously ineffective. Instead they have chosen to attack the people themselves. Specifically in this case they are attacking the children. They obviously see this as the only way they can get to the Russian people and therefore the only way they can effect any kind of change.

Essentially, since the chechnens are not militarily capable of taking on the Russian army headon, there is nothing for the Russian state or it's people to gain from simpy pulling out their troops and leaving the chechens to get on with it. By making life intolerably violent and dangerous for the Russian people they change that completely. With people afraid their loved ones will become victims or that they themselves are personally at risk there is suddenly a hell of a lot to be gained by persuading the govermnent to pull out the troops. Why would they be willing to sacrifice many in order to keep hold of a devastated province ?

It isnt pretty, but it is the way wars were fought for most of the world's history. All that calmly marching up to each other and then swinging axes only held for the warriors. Warfare has always been brutal and the struggles between peoples have historically hurt civilians most. Standard practice in ancient and medieaval warfare was to devastate the surrounding area and starve it's people and maybe also take a bunch of them as slaves along with the rest of the plunder.

War as an honourable and governable action is the luxury of nationstates with armies and strong infrastructures. It is a luxury which Russia has chosen to put aside in it's treatment of the chechens because they do not see Chechnya as a nationstate. The Chechens do not have that luxury to put aside, they have been denied their statehood and their infrastructure has been devastated. Therefore the Chechens have to wage an altogether different kind of war. To make their lands carry such a heavy price that the Russian people become unwilling to continue paying it.

As far as I know none here have seen their homelands devastated and their loved ones slaughtered or tortured or simply "disappeared" Humans are humans and when pushed to the very limits of their despair and brutalised to such a degree then they begin to see the people who did that to them as somehow less worthy of their respect. They become the foreigner and the brutaliser. The human desire for vengeance is strong. It can drive people to wish to visit upon their enemy the torment and pain which was visited upon them. Hence I have some sympathy for the Black Widows. Not, I hasten to add that I see the hostage situation at the school as at all acceptable. But I believe it is possible to deplore someone's actions without ceasing to sympathise with their own distress.

As to the comparison with childmolestors. I dont think that holds. When the chechens attack civilians, they attack the heart of their enemy. The parents of those children are the people whose persuasion needs to be brought to bear on Putin's government. When a paedophile attacks a child and uses as his excuse that he was abused as a child then he is simply repeating blindly a pattern of abuse. What the chechen terrorists are doing is not blind. It is a conscious and thought out plan of attack at the nation which has caused it such turmoil and grief. A paedophile abuses a child to satisfy his urges and the identity of the child is usually irrelevant. The children in that school arenot just random children chosen to satisfy the selfish desires of individual people, they are Russian children, whose parents are seen as at least partly culpable for the situation in Chechnya.

After 9/11 the world went in to a state of shock. None of us could quite believe I think what had occurred. America in pain hit out in a strike that led it to Afghanistan and Iraq. Many people had vengeance on their lips and bombs were rained down upon Iraqi heads. Think of how much that atrocity affected America. Now imagine that the people who had done that were much much more powerful than America( almost impossible to imagine really ) Imagine that there 20 world trade centres, imagine New York flattened to rubble, it's people homeless refugees. Imagine an army tank on your street corner with your enemy seated in it pointing a gun at you. Imagine your children have missed the last 2 years of school. Your brother perhaps has disappeared along with one of your cousins. Your partner of however many years died in your arms. You have lost hope and the world does nothing to ease your pain. There is no coalition of the willing to stand at your side and facse the dangers with you, nor is their an international outpouring of grief for the lost.

It is easy for us to condemn. We in the west are primarily safe. The chances of being involved in a terrorist attack are so minimal as to make them almost not worth calculating. The hard thing to do is to get a grip on the human psychology which leads people in extremis to do appalling things in order to achieve their aims, or simply to assuage their grief filled need for vengeance. To dismiss the people who do this as inhuman is to deny the human condition, to deny the way we as humans are when we've been stripped back to our barest.