Should What ISIS Hostages Endured Before Being Murdered Matter to US Policy?

The New
York Times reports on the brutal treatment of American
hostages James Foley and Steven Sotloff before they were brutally
beheaded by the Islamic State (ISIS):

Mr. Foley and his fellow hostages were routinely beaten
and subjected to waterboarding. For months, they were starved and
threatened with execution by one group of fighters, only to be
handed off to another group that brought them sweets and
contemplated freeing them. The prisoners banded together, playing
games to pass the endless hours, but as conditions grew more
desperate, they turned on one another. Some, including Mr. Foley,
sought comfort in the faith of their captors, embracing Islam and
taking Muslim names….

“You could see the scars on his ankles,” Jejoen Bontinck, 19, of
Belgium, a teenage convert to Islam who spent three weeks in the
summer of 2013 in the same cell as Mr. Foley, said of him. “He told
me how they had chained his feet to a bar and then hung the bar so
that he was upside down from the ceiling. Then they left him
there.”

Read the whole thing.

The sources for the story include hostages who were freed
(typically after ransoms were paid by various governments), local
fixers who worked with journalists and aid workers, and others. It
explains how various jihadist and other groups kidnap people and
then trade them up to groups looking for high-level and potentially
lucrative hostages. ISIS reportedly makes millions of dollars a
year by ransoming captives.

It’s a deeply disturbing article and, I’d argue, a must-read
since it explores and explains not just the motivation and actions
of ISIS but the successful ransoming of hostages by various
governments (there’s a
graphic of the fates, some still unclear, of captives held by
ISIS).

The article explicitly raises the question of whether ransoms
should be paid—a practice in which the governments of many
countries engage. The United States and Great Britain refuse to, an
choice which apparently marks their nationals for death.

Despite that, I think that’s the proper response for the U.S.
government, especially when dealing with non-official
represenatives of the country(both Foley and Sotloff were freelance
journalists who were originally kidnapped by groups other than
ISIS). Leaving aside the question of say, American diplomats or aid
workers operating under offcial government sanction, any other sort
of action would almost certainly increase the level of
hostage-taking and create an even-more unstable situation.

The Times article also implicitly raises the question
of whether the murders of Foley and Sotloff are a legitimate casus
belli. In the United States, there’s no question that the
beheadings of the two Americans inflamed attitudes here and helped
make ongoing military actions in Iraq and Syria not just
politically viable but also popular.

However understandable from an emotional perspective, this
strikes me as a mistake: If American foreign policy is being
dictated by such events—no matter how grisly, barbaric, and deeply
contemptible—we will constantly repeat the same sorts of strategic
and operational disasters that involved us in the region to begin
with. For the past quarter-century or more, our policy toward Iraq
has produced nothing but disaster and the current re-introduction
of troops and military force into the region is almost guaranteed

to continue that record. As I suggested back in August:

If the first decade-plus of the 21st century should have taught
us anything, it’s that the United States’ ability to terraform the
world in its image is severely limited and leads to all sorts of
unintended consequences. In terms of strict humanitarian concerns,
it would better to help people leave war-torn regions and accept
them on our shores.

But if the warrant for a new Iraq war is, in the president’s
words, to make sure that ISIL and other groups are “not engaging in
actions that could cripple a country,” America’s worst days of
playing World
Police are still sadly ahead of us.

Neither Barack Obama, who won the White House in part because of
his seeming repudiation of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, nor the
Republican Party (nor Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic
candidate for 2016) seems to have learned much of anything from the
recent past.