History Forum / General / British History / July 2008

DSH
Lux et Veritas et Libertas
Vires et Honor
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How Hostages, And Nations, Get Liberated

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 11, 2008

On the day the Colombian military freed Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other
long-held hostages, the Italian Parliament passed yet another resolution
demanding her release. Europe had long ago adopted this French-Colombian
politician as a cause célèbre. France had made her an honorary citizen of
Paris, passed numerous resolutions and held many vigils.

Unfortunately, karma does not easily cross the Atlantic.

Betancourt languished for six years in cruel captivity until freed in a
brilliant operation conducted by the Colombian military, intelligence
agencies and special forces -- an operation so well executed that the
captors were overpowered without a shot being fired.

This in foreign policy establishment circles is called "hard power." In the
Bush years, hard power is terribly out of fashion, seen as a mere obsession
of cowboys and neocons. Both in Europe and America, the sophisticates
worship at the altar of "soft power" -- the use of diplomatic and moral
resources to achieve one's ends.

Europe luxuriates in soft power, nowhere more than in l'affaire Betancourt
in which Europe's repeated gestures of solidarity hovered somewhere between
the fatuous and the destructive. Europe had been pressing the Colombian
government to negotiate for the hostages. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez offered to
mediate.

Of course, we know from documents captured in a daring Colombian army raid
into Ecuador in March -- your standard hard-power operation duly denounced
by that perfect repository of soft power, the Organization of American
States -- that Chávez had been secretly funding and pulling the strings of
the FARC. These negotiations would have been Chávez's opportunity to gain
recognition and legitimacy for his terrorist client.

Colombia's President Álvaro Uribe, a conservative and close ally of
President Bush, went instead for the hard stuff. He has for years. As a
result, he has brought to its knees the longest-running and once-strongest
guerrilla force on the continent by means of "an intense military campaign
[that] weakened the FARC, killing seasoned commanders and prompting 1,500
fighters and urban operatives to desert" ( Washington Post). In the end, it
was that campaign -- and its agent, the Colombian military -- that freed
Betancourt.

She was, however, only one of the high-minded West's many causes. Solemn
condemnations have been issued from every forum of soft-power
fecklessness -- the European Union, the United Nations, the G-8 foreign
ministers -- demanding that Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe stop butchering his
opponents and step down. Before that, the cause du jour was Burma, where a
vicious dictatorship allowed thousands of cyclone victims to die by denying
them independently delivered foreign aid lest it weaken the junta's grip on
power.

And then there is Darfur, a perennial for which myriad diplomats and foreign
policy experts have devoted uncountable hours at the finest five-star hotels
to deplore the genocide and urgently urge relief.

What is done to free these people? Nothing. Everyone knows it will take the
hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and
other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them.

Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly
retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy -- Europe specializes in
providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about --
the only solution is foreign intervention.

And who's going to intervene? The only country that could is the country
that in the past two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia,
Kosovo and Afghanistan. Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its
latest endeavor -- the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most
barbarous tyranny of all, and its replacement with what is beginning to
emerge as the Arab world's first democracy -- and having earned
near-universal condemnation for its pains, America has absolutely no
appetite for such missions.

And so the innocent languish, as did Betancourt, until some local power,
inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets it
done -- often with the support of the American military. "Behind the rescue
in a jungle clearing stood years of clandestine American work," explained
The Post. "It included the deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces . . . a
vast intelligence-gathering operation . . . and training programs for
Colombian troops."

Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to God and the Virgin
Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France and Colombia and just about
everybody else.  As of this writing, none to the United States.