Western Responses to the Hostage-Crisis and Crisis-Management

Abstract

The responses by the American, French, and British governments to the abduction of its citizens in Lebanon have underlined the inherent difficulty in striking a balance between their moral obligation towards providing safety and protection for their citizens abroad without having to sacrifice national interests in the conduct of foreign policy. While all three states have pursued a firmly held and coordinated public position of no-negotiations with terrorists and no-concessions to their demands in the Lebanese hostage-crisis, the reality of actual conduct behind this facade has revealed not only the conduct of secret negotiations, either directly with the Hizb’allah, Iran, and Syria or indirectly through third party intermediaries, over the release of hostages, at times resulting in complex and murky deals, but also that the hostage-issue was intimately influenced by the conduct of foreign policies by these Western states in the Middle East.² Although the two Western European states and the United States have shared similar types of problems and challenges in efforts to manage and secure the extraction of its citizens from captivity in Lebanon, each individual state has pursued its own overt and covert policies to accomplish this task.

“Government is about crisis-management. Governments do not think.”¹