If this truly is a paradigm shift on a par with 9/11, then the first lesson has to be: let’s not mess it up like we did last time.
One mistake will be easy to avoid. George W Bush and Tony Blair erred by unleashing the rhetoric and methods of war for what should have been a police operation. Dangerous terrorists who should have been the targets of long, intensive and complex police and intelligence work were instead elevated into martial enemies, giving them the very status they craved. No danger of that specific category error this time: this is an actual war, involving an actual state.
But the risk of misidentifying the enemy remains. Two decades ago, hawks rushed to hail a “clash of civilisations”, as if the west was destined to do battle not with a particular, narrowly defined group of violent jihadists but with Islamism if not Islam itself. That was a fateful and fatal mistake. It saw the US and UK lash out wildly, conquering Afghanistan when a special forces effort to root out al-Qaida was what was required; and, most disastrously, invading Iraq in pursuit of weapons that did not exist. It also saw a battery of domestic moves whose consequence was not the isolation and apprehension of violent jihadists alone, but the demonisation and exclusion of Muslims.
The west must not make that mistake again. It has to be specific. The battle now is against Putin and Putinism, not Russia or Russians. Severing links with institutions tied to the Kremlin makes sense; banning a course on the novels of Dostoevsky is dumb. Most Russians are themselves victims of Putinism. They are the ones who have been robbed blind by him and his henchmen; they are the ones force-fed lies. In the war against Putinism, they will be essential allies.
Putin’s war on Ukraine will shake our world as much as 9/11. Let’s not make the same mistakes | Jonathan Freedland
This threat is far worse than al-Qaida’s. To defeat it, the west must refuse to conflate Russia with its nihilistic leader, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland
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