How Somali pirates could take Obama hostage.

AuthorTierney, Dominic
PositionViewpoint essay

Editor's Note: The fate of Americans imprisoned abroad has always been a highly emotional and politically explosive issue. This essay, based on a presentation at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and originally posted on the FPRI web site (http://www.fpri.org), argues that American idealism, desire for retribution, and concern for national honor in POW and hostage situations can lead to actions and policies that are harmful to U.S. interests, and it suggests ways to minimize this risk.--Ed.

In April 2009, the story of Richard Phillips' capture by Somali pirates, and his dramatic rescue by Navy Seals, became one of the major news stories. The incarceration of Americans by foreign actors, as hostages and prisoners of war, has incredible emotional and political power, and often garners profound media scrutiny.

This intense focus on the fate of captive Americans is a syndrome with very dangerous effects, producing exaggerated attention on the fate of a handful of men and women, encouraging adversaries to detain more Americans, and promoting risky rescue operations, which brought down one president, Jimmy Carter, and helped turn another, Ronald Reagan, into a lame duck. It is a dynamic with the potential to wreck Obama's administration.

Throughout U.S. history, the fate of Americans imprisoned abroad has been a highly emotional and politically explosive issue. During the 1700s, thousands of Americans joined citizen group to raise money to ransom captives held by the Barbary pirates of North Africa, and lobby for more government action. Accounts of detention and escape, known as "captivity narratives," often became bestsellers. The treatment of Union POWs in the Confederate prison at Andersonville during the Civil War is a controversial question to this day. During World War II, the Japanese brutality toward U.S. prisoners was central to the demonization of Japan.

After 1945, the issue of captive Americans became increasingly politically charged. The families of American prisoners of war and missing in action (POW/MIA) in Vietnam began an unprecedented public campaign to aid the captured men, selling five million POW/MIA bracelets inscribed with the name of a missing or captured soldier. Even after the fighting ended, allegations continued into the 1990s that Americans were still being held in Vietnam. Apart from the Stars and Stripes, the only flag that has flown from the White House is the black and white POW/MIA flag.

Shortly after the fall of Saigon in 1975, Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodia captured a U.S. merchant vessel, the Mayaguez, and its crew. The Mayaguez Crisis garnered intense national attention, and when the crew was released in the wake of a U.S. Marine assault, the crisis was seen as one of the major triumphs of Gerald Ford's presidency.

Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, radicals seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking 66 Americans hostage, of whom 52 entered long-term captivity. The U.S. media covered the Iranian hostage crisis in astounding detail. Ted Koppel's Nightline started off as a show devoted to the crisis, with every episode beginning "Day 1 of the Hostage Crisis ..." all the way to "Day 444 ..." when the last hostage was released on January 20, 1981. During the 1980s, national attention was once again focused intensely on the fate of American hostages, this time in Lebanon. Around 100 foreigners were kidnapped in the decade after 1982, including 25 Americans.

When Michael Durant was captured in the Black Hawk Down battle in Somalia in October 1993, his image plastered the cover of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report, and he was the lead story on all the major networks. More recently, in 2003, the account of Private Jessica Lynch's capture and subsequent rescue in Iraq became...

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