Unified kidnapping response needed

Friday, Sept. 5, 2014 | 2 a.m.

The following editorial appeared in the Miami Herald:

The most horrifying aspect of the execution of freelance journalist Steven Sotloff is the utter inhumanity of it — a gruesome beheading captured on video for maximum exposure. Also chilling is the cold-blooded and brutal nature of this sadistic outrage, the taking of a human life as a public spectacle, for show and to make a political point.

The first reaction is horror because of the sheer cruelty of this act, aimed at inflicting maximum pain on both the victim and the audience, followed closely by grief. In the case of Sotloff, whose mother vainly pleaded with the heartless killers to spare her son’s life, the pain hits close to home. Our thoughts and our hearts are with the grief-stricken family.

Neither the outrage over the killing nor the terrifying nature of the crime should blind anyone to the underlying issues, nor should they wrongly influence the response. The executioner, a masked coward, calmly declared that the killing was a reprisal for the bombing campaign carried out by the United States against the Islamic State. Message: The more you bomb, the more Americans we will kill.

The United States cannot comply with this sort of blackmail. No country can allow a terrorist group to control its foreign policy. Similarly, outrage, however well justified it may be, cannot be allowed to guide American policy.

The armchair generals urging an immediate American response should be mindful of the warning of the real generals, who have declared, as the president himself has said, that dealing effectively with the Islamic State won’t be easy.

“It requires a variety of instruments, only one part of which is airstrikes,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the U.S. chief of staff, said Aug. 21. The Islamic State must eventually be confronted and defeated, he went on, but it “requires the application of all the tools of national power — diplomatic, economic, information, military.”

That cannot be ginned up overnight. The best response is a coordinated Western response led by the United States that includes American allies in Europe and elsewhere. President Barack Obama must lead, but devising a hasty strategy in response to public pressure or domestic politics will almost surely be found wanting.

There is another realm of action that also requires coordinated policies with European nations, however, and that is the response to kidnapping and blackmail. The threat posed by the Islamic State and other terrorist groups can best be countered by a unified response.

European governments have been much more willing than the United States to give in to ransom demands for their citizens. According to an exhaustive report by The New York Times this summer, terrorist groups such as al-Qaida have received more than $100 million in revenue since 2008 in response to ransom demands, mainly from European governments.

That provides an incentive for terrorists to kidnap foreigners. It also puts Americans at risk, both as an object lesson to other governments for what happens if they don’t comply and as a way to pressure this country to follow the European model.

As the deaths of Sotloff and journalist James Foley show, the divergent U.S. and European responses are failing. As long as some countries pay and some don’t, everyone is vulnerable.