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"what is to stop him from discarding the accepted rules of war, like his opponents did, and commence firebombing the city centers of chechnya one at a time. "
Too late they already did something very similar.
Radar I do not support the actions of palestinian suicide bombers. I am a pacifist I believe in non violent approach wherever possible. I also however am able to seperate my abhorrence for the actions and take a look at both sides. Since so much of the media portrays these issues with scant regard for one side and airbrushing the other that leads me all to oftenhaving to put ( *smiles* having, of course merely referring to my own self imposed compulsion :P) the point of view of the unreported side in a conflict. The side whose suffering didnt make the world blink let alone act. When their suffering is so categorically ignored and their towns unfamiliar to us until they produce a suicide bomber, I feel in some ways there has been a crime of complicity perpetrated by the world community; a crime which has helped to create the envrionment these atrocities occur in. If I heard nothing in the media about the suffering of the Israeli bomb victims, if most of what I saw was arab propoganda which ignored the very real fears of the Israeli man on the street, glossing over every suicide bomb and reporting in detail every last assassinated Hamas leader's death;if i then came onto the cellar and found that many people seemed unwilling to accept a parity of culpability between the two sides, worse they were insisting on reducing the Israelis to less than human because of their methods, then I would likely find myself arguing their fears.
I do think there is a danger when we refuse to understand people. I dont condone what is happening in Russia, but we have to see this event in the context of a tapestry of other events. To do otherwise is to reduce our understanding of the gestalt and that can only lead to a society less capable of responding in the most effective way possible.
As to the school siege....This is clearly a step too far. It's many steps too far. Some things are of course morally repugnant to most civilised people and naturally I have a very low opinion of the people who are holding childer hostage. That however doesnt prevent me from trying to seek an understanding of what they are trying to achieve and why they have chosen such methodology. It's lazy to just dismiss them as lunatics or psycopaths or simply evil. It's laziness which leads ( imo) to a complacency of thought which is a weakening of actual defenses in society in favour of percieved defences.
It occurs to me I may not have made myself entirely clear in my first post. When I was talking about the Black Widows and disagreeing with Lookout, I was not referring to the school siege. We dont kow who is responsible for that. My own feeling is that it is not the Black Widow. It seems unlikely that women who have lost sons and husbands would focus their attention on babes in arms and mothers like themselves. It would be a real move away from their usual modus operandi. Might be them, but I doubt it. I have a real sympathy for these women. I have sympathy and empathy for what they have suffered. I am inclined to think this siege is being perpetrated by a much more extreme group within the Chechen fight back.
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