Some 10 years ago, I wrote a piece on the death, in an Arab suburb of Jerusalem called Bir Naballah, of an Israeli soldier named Nachshon Wachsman.

Some of you may remember the incident. Wachsman, the son of American parents, had been kidnapped by Hamas and held hostage in a two-story house in an Arab neighborhood. His kidnapers asked for the release from prison of a large number of Palestinian terrorists and threatened to kill him if their demands weren’t met. An Israeli commando unit stormed the house in which he was held and killed them – but not before they managed to kill him.

Although the story was front-page news in Israel, no journalist actually went to the house, which was cordoned off by the army and barred to the press. No journalist, that is, except me. I slipped – rather easily, as it turned out – through the cordon and spent an hour there, trying to reconstruct what had happened. In the end, I came to a disturbing conclusion. The army had blown it. A different angle of attack, a bolder first few seconds, and Wachsman might have been saved.

As I say, I wrote a piece on it. The only problem was that the editor of the paper it was written for refused to publish it. He would not, he told me, run an article second-guessing the Israeli army.

I was furious. I had a scoop and it wasn’t going to appear. I even threatened to resign from my job, but the editor held his ground. He wasn’t going to allow armchair criticism of a military operation that went wrong by someone who might be clever but wasn’t there when it took place.

Today, I’m not sure he wasn’t right. In any case, I couldn’t help thinking of that episode in the wake of the appalling events in Beslan. On the face of it, the Russian army’s attempt to storm a school building in which hundreds died seems to have been the botched product of faulty intelligence, bad planning, an inept command structure, insufficiently trained troops, and poor discipline. It appears to have been doomed to failure in advance, in which case those who launched it made a terrible mistake.

And perhaps they did. But one must be careful about being clever when one wasn’t there. The conditions under which the hostages were being held were terrible; some – particularly the children – were in serious danger from exhaustion and thirst; and it’s a cheap shot to say now, “But what was the rush? The Russians should have waited until they were ready to do it properly.” Try saying that when children are drinking their own urine a hundred meters away.

The question goes deeper than that, however. It involves asking: What, in a conflict that more and more is being correctly viewed as a world war against Islamic terror, is the role of you and me – that is, of the 99.999% of the world’s population who are neither terrorists, nor soldiers nor policemen fighting terrorists, but ordinary people with a slight yet not non-existent chance of being caught up in acts of terror themselves?

Let’s put it more concretely. In a war, we expect soldiers to risk their lives. Sometimes, when their commanders’ judgment is poor, military lives are risked in reckless or callous ways that may arouse our anger or condemnation, but we understand that the risk must be there. No one of a logical cast of mind would think, although armies sometimes behave as though this were the case: “The main object of sending troops into battle against an enemy is to ensure that they all emerge safely.”

This is precisely, however, what most of us do think about the innocent victims of terrorists, like the children and their parents in the school in Beslan. They were not there as soldiers, nor unlike, say, foreigners working in Iraq did they set that day with the knowledge that they were jeopardizing their lives; therefore, the Russian government’s first duty toward them was to extract them unharmed from their situation, any result short of that being a failure on its part.

And yet this attitude, however humane it may seem, turns a blind eye to what terror is about, which is erasing the distinction between legitimate targets like soldiers and illegitimate ones like innocent civilians. Indeed, in the eyes of the terrorist, no one associated in any way with an enemy nation, group, or political camp is innocent. All are legitimate targets – those in street clothes as well as in uniform, children as well as adults, women as well as men.

But if we are all the potential targets of terror, we are also all – like it or not – potential combatants in the war against it, since a war against us all is a war we must all be prepared to take part in. And taking part in this war, one of whose military principles is never to give in to the demands of hostage takers because this only encourages the more brutal and audacious taking of ever larger numbers of hostages, can indeed mean taking terrible risks like those taken in Beslan.

This does not mean that the Russian army acted wisely or responsibly in storming a school in so slipshod a manner. It does mean facing the cruel truth that the war against terror has a price that must be paid by ordinary people, too, and that there are, alas, no non-combatants in it.