“We have to be much tougher, we have to be much stronger than we've been,” said the Republican front-runner. “We have people that know what is going on … I would be very, very firm with families. And frankly, that will make people think, because they may not care much about their lives. But they do care, believe it or not, about their families' lives.”
Donald Trump – Republican Debate Dec. 15, 2015.
When I heard Trump make the above comment, a little bell rang in my head, because I had heard of exactly this same solution being used before.
It was in Lebanon in the mid-1980’s when hostage taking became the preferred method of coercion to force the Super-Powers do or stop some action. Numerous Western diplomats and citizens had been taken and had been held for years. In 1986, it was the turn of the Soviet Union.
Four of its diplomats were kidnapped by Hezbollah in an attempt to force Moscow to reign in the Syrian army, which was shelling its positions. Two days after the kidnapping, one of the diplomats was shot and his body dump in a Beirut trash pile.
However, incredibly, only four weeks later, the remaining three hostages were released. To Western observers, this was an unbelievable turn that defied explanation. Shortly afterwards however, the story emerged of a KGB hit team from the elite “Alpha Group” going to Beirut and resorting to some very brutal tactics to secure the release of their countrymen.
Intrigued by this memory, I did some research and discovered this history (with the suggestion that this is how to deal with hostage taking) in a Right Wing blog with such contributors as Pat Buchanan.
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/how-to-deal-with-hostage-takers-soviet-lessons/
But the ominous threat against one of the holy cities of Shiism was only one prong in the Soviet strategy. According to Benny Morris, who was Jerusalem Post's diplomatic correspondent at that time and later became famous as a brilliant historian, in tandem with the threats, the Soviets took sharper action:
[T]he KGB kidnapped a man they knew to be a close relative of a prominent Hezbollah leader. They then castrated him and sent the severed organs to the Hezbollah official, before dispatching the unfortunate kinsman with a bullet in the brain.
In addition to presenting him with this grisly proof of their seriousness, the KGB operatives also advised the Hezbollah leader that they knew the indentities [sic] of other close relatives of his, and that he could expect more such packages if the three Soviet diplomats were not freed immediately.
Now we know where The Donald gets his foreign policy suggestions.
It is an amusing example of how history can come full circle.
From the 1980’s, when Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” to 2015 when the leading candidate for the Republican party wants to use Soviet tactics in hostage negotiations that he picked up from a Right Wing blog and is cheered by the Republican crowd.
The Republicans have become Soviet Communists.
It only took 30 years