By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post - Friday, July 11, 2008;
On the day the Colombian military freed Ingrid
Betancourt and 14 other long-held hostages, the Italian Parliament
passed yet another resolution demanding her release. Europe
had long ago adopted this French-Colombian politician as a cause celebre. France had made her an honorary citizen of Paris, passed numerous
resolutions and held many vigils.
Unfortunately, karma does not easily cross the Atlantic. Betancourt languished for six years in cruel
captivity until freed in a brilliant operation conducted by the Colombian
military, intelligence agencies and special forces -- an operation so well
executed that the captors were overpowered without a shot being fired.
This in foreign policy establishment circles is called
"hard power." In the Bush years, hard power is terribly out of
fashion, seen as a mere obsession of cowboys and neocons. Both in Europe and America, the
sophisticates worship at the altar of "soft power" -- the use of
diplomatic and moral resources to achieve one's ends.
Europe luxuriates in soft power, nowhere more than in
l'affaire Betancourt in which Europe's repeated gestures of solidarity hovered
somewhere between the fatuous and the destructive. Europe
had been pressing the Colombian government to negotiate for the hostages. Venezuela's Hugo
Chávez offered to mediate.
Of course, we know from documents captured in a daring
Colombian army raid into Ecuador in March -- your standard hard-power operation
duly denounced by that perfect repository of soft power, the Organization
of American States -- that Chávez had been secretly funding and pulling the
strings of the FARC. These negotiations would have
been Chávez's opportunity to gain recognition and legitimacy for his terrorist
client.
Colombia's
President Álvaro
Uribe, a conservative and close ally of President
Bush , went instead for the hard stuff. He has for years. As a result, he
has brought to its knees the longest-running and once-strongest guerrilla force
on the continent by means of "an intense military campaign [that] weakened
the FARC, killing seasoned commanders and prompting 1,500 fighters and urban
operatives to desert" ( Washington
Post). In the end, it was that campaign -- and its agent, the Colombian
military -- that freed Betancourt.
She was, however, only one of the high-minded West's many
causes. Solemn condemnations have been issued from every forum of soft-power
fecklessness -- the European
Union, the United
Nations, the G-8 foreign ministers -- demanding
that Robert
Mugabe of Zimbabwe stop butchering his opponents and step down. Before that,
the cause du jour was Burma,
where a vicious dictatorship allowed thousands of cyclone victims to die by
denying them independently delivered foreign aid lest it weaken the junta's
grip on power.
And then there is Darfur,
a perennial for which myriad diplomats and foreign policy experts have devoted
uncountable hours at the finest five-star hotels to deplore the genocide and
urgently urge relief.
What is done to free these people? Nothing. Everyone knows
it will take the hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma,
Sudan
and other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them.
Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly
retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy -- Europe specializes in
providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about --
the only solution is foreign intervention.
And who's going to intervene? The only country that could
is the country that in the past two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia,
Kosovo and Afghanistan.
Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its latest endeavor -- the
liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most barbarous tyranny of all, and its
replacement with what is beginning to emerge as the Arab world's first
democracy -- and having earned near-universal condemnation for its pains,
America has absolutely no appetite for such missions.
And so the innocent languish, as did Betancourt, until some
local power, inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets
it done -- often with the support of the American
military. "Behind the rescue in a jungle clearing stood years of
clandestine American work," explained The Post. "It included the
deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces . . . a vast intelligence-gathering
operation . . . and training programs for Colombian troops."
Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to
God and the Virgin
Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France
and Colombia
and just about everybody else. As of this writing, none to the United States.
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