Read the whole thing but here is the conclusion.
Nothing except scale distinguishes the kidnapping of the two German engineers from the Mohammed cartoon shakedown. Both identically involve the demand for concessions in exchange for the removal of a threat. Both exploit the asymmetry between short and long term interests to force the result. The short term interest of a kidnapping victim's relatives is to pay just as the immediate interest of a newspaper is to apologize to get the circulation numbers going. And so they pay and they apologize. Politicians with an eye on the opinion polls operate on similarly short time scales. Whatever damage appeasement or ransoms may cause to the country, it can safely be dumped on future generations of politicians, who will most likely belong to the opposition party anyway, and isn't that a good two for one value deal? What matters is the next election cycle; the next day's headlines; the next talk show's soundbites. Political externalities, like environmental ones, are borrowings against the future. They represent a kind of inter-generational debt.
What ultimately keeps this scheme from progressing indefinitely is the rapidly decreasing interval between the time a new political debt is incurred and the time it falls due. At first the consequences of appeasement will be slow in appearing but gradually they present themselves with increasing rapidity. Eventually the consequences of appeasement come so quickly that they occur within the same election cycle and politicians find the need to reinvent themselves as "statesmen". Upheavals are history's way of retiring the mountain of political debts earlier generations of hacks have accumulated. The Germans who supported the ransoms should be told that despite the millions disbursed they haven't paid yet.
Neither have the media who refused to publish the Muhammad cartoons.
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