NATALIE SOLENT says Putin did the right thing, in spite of the casualties. I think she’s right. The gas thing seems to have been handled in a less-than-optimal fashion, and people died.

But people would have died anyway — probably in greater numbers. And this was done in an emergency, with hostages already being killed by terrorists who were ready to die themselves.

I can’t help but feel that some of the criticism of Putin is a weird and particularly despicable form of schadenfreude, which has been echoed in a few emails that I’ve gotten, along the lines of “Your get-tough approach didn’t work too well, did it?”

It seems to me that this attitude — that it’s preferable to do nothing and let people be killed than to do something and perhaps cause people, even in smaller numbers, to be killed — is an example of the pathological fear of effectuality that I was discussing earlier.

I think that — as Natalie writes — it’s better to do something like this than to pay the Danegeld and encourage more such behavior. It’s possible that Putin’s decision will turn out to be wrong, but I don’t think so. Letting a mixture of Arab and Chechen terrorists kill over 700 citizens unobstructed would have been wrong.

UPDATE: Ron Campbell agrees. So does Cato.