Not a Step Back !!

I've been reading about hostage season in Iraq all this week. It seems that every Iraqi gunman and his brother are falling all over themselves to grab as many foreigners as they can.

I've read about the protests, like in the Japan where people marched to urge the government to pull out troops because they got people taken. And in other places, more or less the same thing. What do I think ? Should a government pull out troops and give away because the enemy took hostages/prisoners ? No, absolutely not.

Why not ? Because if you do, then the insurgents/terrorists/militiamen who commit such learn an important lesson in international politics. What lesson is that ? Violence works. Bowing to the wishes of people who take hostages and threaten to kill them creates a deadly precedent. After all, if it works once it should work all the time right ? Unhappy about something some country is doing ? Easy, grab a bunch of frightened civilians of offending nationality, grab a camera, film said hostages with a bunch of armed people dressed in cammo and drop it at an embassy. Soon the public will see the video and protest. And soon after that, they get their way. No fuss, easy diplomacy.

That's why dealing with terrorists/insurgents this way in a bad idea. A few years ago, Filipino Abu Sayyaf terrorists grabbed a bunch of people at a resort at Sipadan Island. The Malaysian government paid the ransom they asked. Guess what ? Abu Sayyaf did it again a few weeks later. See the circle forming ?

The government should have sent the PASKAL (M'sian Navy Spec Force) after them, that's what should have happened. Sure there is the risk that the hostages might get killed. But what can you do. In Russia, Chechen gunmen held up a theatre with nearly a hundred people inside. The Russian military sent the Red Army after them and gassed the theatre. Quite a number of civillians were killed. Is that the ideal way to go about this ? Certainly not. No body wants to see innocent bystanders get killed. But, again what do you do when you can no longer negotiate ? And true, such actions will NOT eliminate terrorist acts. But it certainly won't encourage it either. And next time, those Chechen tangos will think twice about planning something this big again. They might do it again for sure, but they also know they won't pull it off without cost to themselves.

I'm not a hawk. I hate war as much as the next person. War is about stupid, random, senseless death no matter how "worthy" the cause. In the late seventies & eighties, I've lost neighbours and relatives fighting Communist terrorists, so I'm no stranger to the facts (I was very young but I remember the conversations & the funerals). But to let terror influence the policy of a country is to merely encourage the act of terror as a negotiating tool. You can't stop terror by bowing to it.

Neither can you stop terror with punitive action. In my opinion, terror can be handled by finding the cause and addressing it.

Just my two cents.