Opinion: Photographed from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it's only when you peer closer that you realize that's because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They're children.
Row upon row of dead children, over a hundred or more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.
Flee from whom? Let's take three representative responses: "Guerillas," said the New York Times. "Chechen separatists," ventured the BBC, eventually settling for "hostage-takers". "Insurgents," said the Guardian's Isabel Hilton, hyper-rational to a fault: "Today's hostage-taking," she explained, "is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly.
"If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets - the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved - become targets because they are available." And then there was Adam Nicolson in London's Daily Telegraph, who filed one of those ornately anguished columns full of elevated, overwritten allusions - each child was "a Pietà, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V" - and yet in a thousand words he's too busy honing his limpid imagery to confront the fact that this foul deed had perpetrators, never mind the identity of those perpetrators.
Sorry, it won't do. I remember a couple of days after September 11th writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it.
Three years on, that's still the difference. We can all get upset about dead kids, but unless you're giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter, your tasteful elegies are no use. Nor are the hyper-rationalist theories about "asymmetrical warfare". For one thing, Isabel Hilton is wrong: "insurgent bullets" can "penetrate military armour".
A rabble with a few AKs and a couple of RPGs have managed to pick off a thousand men from the world's most powerful military machine.
The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the kids. But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.
So the particular character of this "insurgency" does not derive from the requirements of "asymmetrical warfare" but from . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead "Chechen separatists" were not Chechens at all, but Arabs. And yet, tastefully tiptoeing round the subject, the New York Times couldn't bring itself to use the words "Muslim" or "Islamist", for fear presumably of offending multicultural sensibilities.
In the 1990s, thousands of volunteers from across the globe passed through terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and were then dispatched to Indonesia, Kosovo, Sudan and Chechnya. Wealthy Saudis - including members of the royal family - invested millions in setting up mosques and madrassahs in what were traditionally spheres of a more accommodationist Islam and successfully radicalized a generation of young Muslim men.
If the Russian children are innocent, the Russian state is not. Its ham-fisted campaign in Chechnya is as brutal as it is ineffectual. After the Iraq war, I wrote: "How would you feel if you were Putin? Your guys kill more people in a single Moscow theatre than Bush's do liberating Baghdad" - a slight exaggeration, but only just, and the basic point is sound: Bush toppled the Ba'athist regime in a month and handed over sovereignty to a new government in 15 months, while Moscow has spent years killing hundreds of thousands and reducing Grozny to rubble and is as far away as ever from resolving its problem.
The Muslims have a better case in Chechnya than they do in the West Bank, Kashmir or any of the other troublespots where the Islamic world rubs up against the infidels. But that said, as elsewhere, whatever the theoretical merits of the cause, it's been rotted from within by the Islamist psychosis.
The good news is that the carnage in Beslan was so shocking it prompted a brief appearance by that rare bird, the "moderate Muslim". Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of al-Arabiya Television, wrote a column in Asharq al-Awsat headlined: "The Painful Truth: All The World's Terrorists Are Muslims!"
"Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," he wrote. This is true. But the question remains: So what? What are you going to do about it? If you want your religion to be more than a diseased death cult, you're going to have to take a stand.
What happened in one Russian schoolhouse is an abomination that has to be defeated, not merely regretted. But the only guys with any kind of plan are the Bush administration. Last Thursday, President Bush committed himself yet again to wholesale reform of the Muslim world. You can't turn Saudi Arabia and Yemen into New Hampshire or Sweden (according to taste), but if you could transform them into Singapore or Papua New Guinea or Belize or just about anything else you'd be making an immense improvement. It's a long shot, unlike Putin's plan to bomb them Islamists into submission or Chirac's reflexive inclination to buy them off, but Bush is at least tackling the "root cause".
If you've got a better idea, let's hear it. Right now, his is the only plan on the table. The ideology and rationale that drove the child-killers in Beslan is the same as that motivating cells in Rome and Manchester and Seattle and Sydney. In this war, you can't hold the line against the next depravity.