With the confirmation that another U.S. hostage held by ISIS has been killed, President Obama is once again being criticized for refusing to pay ransoms for Americans held by the terrorist group. Throughout the last two years, as ISIS snatched foreigners living or working in areas of Syria and Iraq under their control, most nations have paid increasingly exorbitant amounts to gain the freedom of their nationals. The U.S. has consistently refused to follow this practice or to allow the families of those taken to do so. Now even normally sober observers, such as Aaron David Miller, are calling for a loosening of that policy. But as much as the rise of ISIS can be traced in part to the foreign-policy blunders committed by his administration, the president is still doing the right thing by insisting that ransoms must not be paid.
Obama spoke of the death of Kayla Jane Mueller, the Western aid worker whose death has now been confirmed, in an interview with BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith in which he described the difficulty of his decision to opt for rescue rather than ransom. Even the president’s sternest critics must sympathize with him when he says that telling the families of hostages that he will not pay for their liberation is as “tough as anything I do.” He also revealed that he had ordered a rescue mission in which the U.S. reportedly deployed Delta Force commandos into Syria trying to find Mueller and other hostages held by ISIS. According to the president, the raid came a day or two late as the captives had already been moved to another location.
Obama paid tribute to Mueller and contrasted her aid work with “the barbaric organization that held her captive.” But that eulogy won’t satisfy her loved ones who care only about the fact that she is dead, whether at the hands of her captors or, as ISIS has claimed, from injuries incurred when the building in which she was held was hit by bombs dropped from Jordanian planes.
As I’ve written before about this issue, I understand the motivations of the families. Which one of us would not move heaven and earth and be prepared to do anything to save the life of a child, a spouse, a parent, a sibling, or even a close friend? But President Obama’s responsibility is to safeguard the interests and the security of the nation and not just to one or even a few individuals in peril.
It is widely understood that ISIS’s military success has been fueled in no small measure by the profits it has made in selling hostages. If they have overplayed their hand and generated more outrage than fear by beheading Americans or burning a Jordanian prisoner alive, the terrorists have also succeeding in making kidnapping pay handsomely. The problem is not just that the more hostages that are ransomed, the more likely that other Westerners will face a similar fate. It’s that the vast sums ISIS has made in this business have been put to use funding operations that have resulted in their control of much of the territory of two nations and threatening both American security and the future of our allies.
The real point that most of those calling for Obama to relent on this policy are missing is that the West is at war with ISIS. The president is partly responsible for this misperception with his comments that treat Islamist terror as a policing problem and by his foolish refusal to speak of their motivations and purpose. ISIS and other Islamist groups are not mere violent zealots randomly killing people. Their goal is to destroy Western democracy and to force nonbelievers to accept their religious beliefs.
It is true that the U.S. has ransomed hostages before. President Reagan gained the freedom of some Americans held in Lebanon by bribing the Iranian government. Obama bought the freedom of Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier held by the Taliban. But as troubling as both of those examples might be, there is a difference between negotiating with a foreign government and doing an exchange of prisoners of war. Both of those decisions were mistakes, but they are not really analogous to enriching a terrorist group waging a war on the West.
Those who put themselves in harm’s way in Syria, whether out of humanitarian motives or misguided politics, did not deserve to become bargaining chips for barbarians or to be murdered by them. But the president was absolutely right to determine that the only reasonable course of action for the United States was to attempt to rescue them and not to do business with terrorists.
If the U.S. is to prevail in its war with ISIS, it will need more resolute leadership from the president, whose lack of a clear strategy or a willingness to provide a moral clarion call to action is undermining American efforts. He has erred both by refraining from a whole-hearted military campaign and by making deeply troubling statements in which he has made inaccurate analogies between the actions of ISIS and crimes committed by Christians centuries ago.
But he is right to stand his ground on ransoms. Those who are criticizing that decision are not merely wrong. They fail to grasp that in a war, giving your foes the resources they need to kill more Americans would not merely be wrong, but a grave dereliction of duty on the part of the president.
