The abduction of an Egyptian diplomat in Iraq followed by the attacks yesterday on emissaries from Bahrain and Pakistan demonstrates a new low to which the insurgents have sunk. It is a basic tenet of a civilized world that diplomats are become targets of aggression, however at odds a host country may be with the state the diplomats represent. Even when diplomacy fails and countries declare war, governments are expected to give safe passage to their enemies’ diplomatic staff for them to return home.

Diplomats are normally far more than ambassadors who merely represent their government’s views. Members of foreign legations are expected to learn as much as they can about the countries to which they are posted. This includes meeting everyone of importance, including politicians, journalists and other opinion makers. It also includes talking to ordinary people and gauging the opinions and concerns of the man in the street. This process can have extra value for host countries. At the discretion of his government, a good diplomat who has mastered his brief can play an invaluable role in defusing tensions between neighboring states or bringing domestic political rivals together in private, even when their public posture remains one of enmity. The way for many notable settlements, both international and domestic, has often been paved by quiet and totally unsung diplomacy.

It is thus all the more deplorable that insurgents, who claim to be acting in the name of Iraqis, should cast aside one of the most fundamental values of Arab civilization. It only makes matters worse that the terrorists have chosen to target diplomats from fellow Arab countries who are clearly best qualified to understand the diverse tensions and undercurrents at work in Iraq. Once again decent people must ask themselves what sort of a world Iraq’s men of violence are trying to create if they can behave with such barbarity? The idea that Iraq can somehow ride to liberation on a tidal wave of innocent Iraqi blood is sickening. It smacks of the wicked indifference of Bolshevism when Lenin and then Stalin deliberately organized famine to destroy political opposition in vast swathes of the Russian countryside. This inhumanity was perpetrated in the name of a better world that Communism never delivered.

We can only wonder what ordinary Sunnis really think of this new front that has been opened by the insurgents and their Al-Qaeda allies against diplomats. Perhaps they are beginning to believe that an insurrection that once engaged their support is turning into an indefensible negation of all decent values. They may begin looking more seriously at the route to a diverse but fully representative Iraq offered by the new constitution and the interim administration. It is one thing to attack a heavily-armed American soldier in the hatred-filled belief that he has not come to bring peace but rather to occupy. It is quite another to prey upon a diplomat, whose peaceful mission is to listen and understand. Sadly, however, perhaps that is precisely why Arab emissaries are being targeted — because they are in the strongest position to comprehend the moral bankruptcy and infinite evil of Al-Qaeda killers and their deluded allies.