Draft talk:Kidnapping and Assassination of Chester Bitterman

There is already a Chet Bitterman page, although it is somewhat anemic by Wikipedia biography standards. It could be argued that this page (Kidnapping and Assassination of Chester Bitterman) should be fused with that one in order to strengthen it. However there may be other compelling reasons for leaving this one as a stand-alone. There are a number of precedents for stand-alone ‘Assassination’ pages (Assassination of John Kennedy, Assassination of Martin Luther King, Assassination of John Lennon), although the geopolitical importance of Bitterman’s death probably doesn’t match those. However Bitterman’s was a watershed moment historically and that’s why it may deserve a stand-alone page. It should be remembered that President Ronald Reagan was elected, in no small measure, based on his criticism of his predecessor’s (Jimmy Carter’s) handling of the Iran Hostage Crisis. He said he was too soft. Then, only three weeks into his own presidency, Reagan is confronted with his own intractable hostage crisis, that of Bitterman in Colombia. Taking a hard line, he refuses to speak to the hostage takers or make any overtures to them (unlike Carter in Iran). This became the norm after that and is still the practice today in the US, Israel, the EU, Russia, etc. Speaking to terrorists is seen as a sign of weakness and a concession. Bitterman died, possibly as a result of this intransigence. (Ironically, all the Iranian hostages came home safely.) The Bitterman kidnapping and killing also introduced other dilemmas of dealing with terrorism in the modern setting. It is a perfect case study into ethical questions still unanswered: how to respond to terrorist outrages without losing one’s humanity, how to balance empathy for victims against the political cost of negotiation, the use of disinformation on all sides, the role of Western institutions in provoking terrorism in developing countries and the rage and cycle of violence generated by unpunished attacks. For these reasons and others I would suggest the Kidnapping and Assassination story is bigger than simply Chester Bitterman’s biography and deserves to stand alone. Besides being historically important and a turning point on the terrorist landscape, it is relatively unknown outside specialist diplomatic circles, the story is compelling in itself, its controversies keep swirling (like in the Kennedy case), his killers are still unknown and possibly still free and it serves as a perpetual cautionary tale.