I received a very cordial note from Ms. Ilana Mercer in response to my posting just below, on how to respond to the demands of hostage takers. She wrote:
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Someone sent me your entry.
I offered a different perspective in “After Their Heads Roll, America’s Dead Remain Faceless“.
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I responded to her thoughtful essay with the following letter. (Note, were my comment system functioning, I would have put the exchange in the comment section. Before reading my response, of course, I’d recommend reading Ms. Mercer’s essay.)
Dear Ms. Mercer,
Thank you for the link to your essay, which I found eloquently argued but not convincing.
In particular, I do not agree with the claim that “The argument that by negotiating with terrorists we may embolden them doesn’t bear a moment’s examination.” Surely it bears at least a moment’s examination. The terrorists could certainly become bolder and could grab yet more hostages and subject them to the same treatment as Mrs. Hassan, Mr. Bigley, Mr. Berg, and the others . There is good reason to believe that at least some of the kidnappings are undertaken by “Ali Babas,” many of them hardened criminals who had been released from prison on Saddam Hussein’s orders just before the war as a “poison pill” for the post war government. They grab the victims and then sell them to the ideological terrorists for money. With each capitulation, the value of having a victim goes up. That certainly has an effect on both the ideological terrorists and the criminal gangs who sell them victims. A moment’s examination is merited. In fact, much more than a moment.
I also wonder how far you would take the principles that you articulated in your essay. You wrote, “the hostages can be saved. The question, however, remains: should we negotiate with terrorists? The answer is: it depends. There are manifold complexities. Certainly matters are not as simple as Bush has led sacrificial lambs like the Hensley family to believe.” Since capitulations to terrorists will increase the value of hostages, we could expect to see more hostage-taking. That seems pretty simple. The French government, faced with the same threat to French citizens, refused to rescind what seems to me a rather clearly unjust law governing what school pupils put on their own heads. Should the French government have rescinded the law? Let’s set aside the injustice of the law in question and posit that it was not an unjust law, but a case of holding known murderers in prison. That happened in the 1980s when I was in Paris. Lebanese terrorists were in French prisons and their comrades were blowing up bombs on Paris streets. (I walked past two of those bombs, which went off not long after I had passed by, so they made an impression on me.) Those bombs resulted in the deaths of innocent Parisians. The French did not back down. Should they have let murderers out of prison in order to stop the bombings? They refused, on the grounds that that would have emboldened other potential bombers to make similar demands for their friends or family members. That seems pretty simple to me. You indicate no reason or principle that would tell us when not to capitulate. Since you seem to favor unilateral and immediate withdrawal of all U.S. and British forces (and presumably, South Korean, Polish, Australian, Estonian, Bulgarian, Albanian, etc., etc. forces), it seems that you’ve found a reason to further that cause, viz., to save the lives of hostages. But I don’t think that you do that cause any favors by tying it to a case that would, if followed consistently, lead to the most brutal winning every battle that they chose to wage. If a government were to adopt your reasoning, what would stop them from, say, rescinding gay marriage in Massachusetts or restoring the ban on interracial marriage in Virginia, if an American charity worker were kidnapped by terrorists who made such demands? Surely, that can’t be right. Yet I see nothing in your essay that would argue against it.
Being moved to tears by the pleas of a victim should not lead us to abandon our reason, which is what I think your essay suggests. I don’t know what I would do in such a situation, because I have never been tested and hope that I never am tested in that way. But I also hope that the U.S. or British governments would not change their policies merely in order to save my life. I disagree that Tony Blair or George Bush are simply indifferent to the victims, as you suggest. I think that they are thinking like I do. An actual case of indifference is the indifference shown by almost all of the opponents of going to war with Iraq, by which I mean those who favored the Clinton administration’s policies of embargo and random bombing (well, mostly random, if we set aside the dropping of bombs every time Monica Lewinski appeared on TV and on the day of the impeachment vote, when Clinton’s defenders accused his impeachers of “treason” for voting for impeachment “when troops were in the field”). Those bombings killed thousands of Iraqis, most of them clearly noncombatants. I remember no marches, no protests, no weepy speeches by Susan Sarandon or Tim Robbins. That’s indifference. When thousands of Serbs were killed by the Clinton administration, the only people who protested were a few libertarians (I was among them) and various ethnic Serbs. The rest didn’t care. That’s indifference. Refusing to capitulate to terrorist extortion? That’s not indifference. That’s concern for the consequences for others of such an act.
Thank you again for sending me your cordial note with a link to your essay, which I enjoyed reading and about which I did some thinking before sending this response.
Cordially,
Tom G. Palmer