NY Times Op-Ed guy David Brooks has a piece today called “Cult of Death,” in which he tries to tidy up the tragedy in Beslan, suicide bombers in Palestine and 9/11 by reducing it all to some sort of irrational pure evil.

Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called “separatists” and “hostage-takers.” Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?

This is embarrassing editorializing, at best. I don’t know anything about Brooks, but this is a simpleton analysis of an incredibly complex phenomenon. There are some HUGE factors here that are being ignored as though they don’t exist. Brooks writes a compelling piece, to be sure, and it will be a welcome salve to people who fancy themselves serious thinkers but who, deep down, don’t really have the stomach for any kind of sustained complexity in their political lives.

It’s not about “rationalizing” the murders, jackass, it’s about understanding them. Brooks seems to think that behavior has two possible states – perfectly rational and perfectly irrational. This is pure silliness. And even if behavior were perfectly irrational, that doesn’t mean that the irrationality can’t be comprehended. If there were no reasons at work, then we wouldn’t have these kinds of politically motivated baby killings in isolated spots around the globe – they’d be everywhere, all the time.

Let’s think about it. You have cultures that are either occupied or in some dramatic way disenfranchised. As a result they often have a standard of living that makes the worst slums in America look like Cabo in comparison. There is apparently no hope for diplomatic or democratic redress of their condition. Then toss in a healthy dose of the kinds of extreme theology that’s bound to arise from these sorts of circumstances.

The mass murders are connected to Chechnya, Palestine and Saudi Arabia, in the cases we’re talking about. These kinds of things aren’t happening in Tuscany, Arizona or Kyoto. Maybe – and I’m just speculating here – maybe this means something. Maybe people get irrational for reasons, and in some cases sheer, utter despair is a good place to start looking. Maybe evil has causes. I don’t know – I read the papers and I can’t remember the last time terrorists representing a culture that was in pretty good shape economically and that was well-represented in their government pulled off a stunt like we saw last week in Russia.

None of this justifies or excuses the kind of sub-human behavior we saw in Beslan, that we see routinely in Palestine and that we saw on 9/11. Far from it. But you can’t cure a disease you don’t understand, and you can’t understand a disease by slapping an “evil” sticker on it and patting yourself on the back for being brave enough to say in the Times what every dropout in the Great American Outback has been saying in his local bar for years.