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We Need to be More Rational about Hostages [1]

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Date: 2023-10-21  

I don’t claim to know just how hostage situations should be dealt with. (Especially in so complicated a situation as the holding of so many hostages by Hamas in Gaza.) But having observed various hostage situations for nearly a half century, I do feel I know enough to say that nations like ours would do well to be more hard-heated — though not inwardly hard-hearted — about how we think about hostages and how we deal with hostage-takers.

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“Human bargaining chips.”

That’s the phrase I just heard on MSNBC yesterday, as they discuss the release of two American hostages by Hamas. The reporters were aware that Hamas is using their hostages to advance their purposes.

But at the same time, the network itself making those “bargaining chips” greater value by giving this hostage release — and the whole hostage situation — huge coverage.

Throughout this crisis, the network has been repeatedly interviewing agonized families whose loved ones are being held hostage. They repeatedly provide moving descriptions of the people who are in the clutches of the same people who raped and beheaded innocents when they attacked Israeli communities.

Hostages make good drama for the media, because the pain and tragedy are at the human scale, something everyone can understand at a gut level. So the cable networks accentuate everything about the hostage dimension of the situation.

The President has also contributed to this magnification of the hostage part of the crisis when he and his spokespeople declare repeatedly that getting the hostages back safely is his “top priority.”

I really hope that’s not his top priority.

So it is necessary to keep the hostages in perspective — Biden’s top priority should be for the interests and the values of the United States to be well served by how this crisis unfolds. If it’s important enough for the President of the United States to fly to that war zone, then the American stakes in this crisis are much bigger than the finite number of lives of the hostages.

(Nations sacrifice individuals to protect the larger community, like sending soldiers to die on the battlefield, for example. And the lives of the soldiers are as valuable as the lives of hostages.)

Besides keeping hostages in proper proportions to the other huge interests at stake, there is a strategic issue here: a nation being extorted by hostage takers should be deflating the value of the “bargaining chips” rather than inflating them.

(I believe a major reason Jimmy Carter lost the Presidency to Ronald Reagan in the1980 election is that Carter magnified the importance of the hostages the Iranians had taken after the Ayatollah’s revolution. It was a big mistake for Carter to announce (something like) that he would confine himself to the White House — or some such self-limitations — until the hostages were freed. He thus made himself hostage to the Iranians. He made himself look weak. By helping to make “The Iranian Hostage Crisis” practically the only story of that year, President Carter put into the hands of the Ayatollah’s forces the ability to take him down.)

Surely there is some sort of balance to be sought, between acknowledging the importance of the human lives at stake, and the deep stress for their loved ones, on the one hand, and — on the other hand, keeping the lives of the hostages in the proper perspective, in view of all that’s at stake in the situation.

Hostage-taking is usually one dimension of a battle between those who seize the hostages and the group or nation to which the hostages belong. A wise nation deals with hostage-takers to save the hostages, but not at the cost of hurting its chances in the larger battle.

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