brooks' argues, in essence, that terrorists are just plain evil. looking at reasons or causes for their action is engaging in "mental diversion" or "rationalizing terror." rather than addressing the issue, people who worry about what the terrorists are worrying about, brooks argues, are avoiding the real issue. the real issue is evil and evil is a black box, so you can't analyze it or attribute reasons behind it. it just is, even though we should work to destroy it.
brooks' column is essentially an endorsement of the simple-minded approach championed by president bush and i find that approach (whether articulated in simple declarative sentences like "bring it on" or "smoke him out", or using brooks more wordy column) to be not only simplistic and contradictory, and also extraordinarily counter-productive.
i think the simple-mindedness of the approach is evident, so let's more on to how it's contradictory. one thing neither brooks nor the president will do is define terrorism. if you're going to deem something as "evil," and thus beyond reason, we should at least define where reason's boundaries lie. generally "terrorism" is defined as: using violence against civilians to accomplish political or military goals
under this definition, the u.s. military has engaged in terrorism (the bombing of dresden, for example, fits this definition). so sometimes soldiers are excluded from the definition of terrorism, so it becomes: the use of violence by civilians against civilians to accomplish political or military goals. but here's the rub, under either definition, we need to know why the perpetrators commit their violent acts before we can call it terrorism. indeed the "political or military goal" element of the definition of terrorism is central to the whole concept. if someone blows up a building to express displeasure with a government, it is terrorism. if someone blows up a building to stop a fire from spreading, to clear the way for a new building, or to make a movie, it is not terrorism, even if people end up dying in the process. the reason terrorists do what they do is part of what makes the action terrorism.
to demand, as brooks does, that we not look at the reasons for terrorists actions means, in essence, that we can never deem anything as terrorism. if we don't look at why someone decided to blow up a building, we can't know whether it was an accident or an attack. it's circular too. we shouldn't look at the reasons for terrorism but we don't know what is terrorism without knowing the reason.
but aside from being paradoxical, brooks' position is counter-productive. if you don't look at why a group of people committed an act of terrorism, you limit your ability to stop future terrorist acts. a terrorist group's motives will tell you if the next target is more likely to be a mosque, synagogue or a hindu temple, which embassies are likely targets, etc. that kind of information is useful.
and beyond that, knowledge of a terrorist group's motives can reveal its appeal to recruits, which helps if you want to disrupt the group's recruitment efforts. and yes, even asking whether your own policies have encouraged people to turn to violence is a fair question if you are serious about decreasing that sort of violence in the future.
but brooks doesn't want us to ask those questions. he seems to think that by asking what russia did to drive chechens to such violent extremes, it somehow excuses the perpetrators of the breslan attack. it doesn't. blame is not a zero sum game. if i leave my bicycle on my front porch overnight and it gets stolen, it's fair to suggest that maybe i should stop leaving my things on the porch overnight. that suggestion does not mean that they guy who took my bike is not a bastard for taking my bike. he's still a criminal, but i still should be more careful with my things. changing my behavior in response to the bad actions of others is not "negotiating with criminals" is simply common sense.
what really gets me about brooks' column is all of the examples of "rationalizing evil" seem perfectly reasonable to me: the boston globe notes the horror of the beslan attack but also "condemn[s] Putin and various Russian policy errors." in 1999 putin invaded chechnya for the second time claiming that it would put an end to terrorism and lawlessness in the caucuses. isn't it reasonable to consider whether, in light of breslan, putin's policies made things better or worse?
similarly, brooks quotes the dutch foreign minister saying the following: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened." what exactly is wrong with that? it seems to be a perfectly reasonable statement to me. as the dutch government later explained:
A Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman said the minister had never intended to criticise Russian actions.brooks, of course, never mentions this further clarification.
"Because of the large number of casualties, in order to understand better what happened, he'd like information about what happened. He did not say the Russians did something wrong," the spokesman said.
"The Russian government has taken this like a criticism, which was not the intention of the minister," he said.
brooks also decries the fact that the breslan terrorists were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." brooks calls the use of those terms as evidence that "Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil." but, they were hostage-takers. what tipped me off is the fact that they took hostages. i don't get brooks' claim that by calling hostage-takers "hostage-takers" we are somehow avoiding talking about evil. isn't taking hostages evil?
and as for separatists, according to the hostage-takers' demands, they clearly were that too. that's right, they can be both hostage-takers and separatists at the very same time. brooks doesn't get it, he seems to think we can handle only one label at a time. just as they can be hostage-takers and separatists, they can also be terrorists. and if you prefer more morally-charged terms, they can also be evil. calling them one doesn't exclude the others. brooks seems to think that by using any term other than evil to describe the perpetrators of terrorist acts, i am closing my eyes to the true depths of their evil. but calling someone simply evil does not add any depth, it's shallow. it gives less, not more, impression of the horror of what happened. and by closing the door to any analysis of why evil people do what they do, it unnecessarily ties our hands in preventing future crimes.
