The Dilemma of Retaliation

By George Church.

Should the U.S. retaliate against the hijacking of the TWA airliner and the events that followed? If so, whom should it hit, and how?

Those were not questions the Reagan Administration would discuss over the weekend. Officials insisted that their thoughts were riveted entirely on the lives of the passengers aboard the hijacked jet. But they were well aware that retaliation poses agonizing dilemmas, especially for an Administration that has promised to strike back at terrorists yet has never done it.

None of the options are appealing. The U.S. could, for example, bomb a known training camp for terrorists in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, as Israel has done. Secretary of State George Shultz has portrayed Israel as a model of effective counterterrorist action. But terrorists are adept at surrounding themselves with innocent civilians, some of whom could be killed in a retaliatory raid. Moreover, the deterrent effect is questionable. Terrorists, including members of Islamic Jihad, the Shi'ite Muslim group thought to be responsible for the hijacking, are often fanatics who place as little value on their own lives as on those of their victims.

Alternatively, the U.S. could go to the presumed root of the trouble: Iran. Carrier-based U.S. warplanes could, for instance, bomb an Iranian air base, an action that the Carter Administration considered taking if Iran had begun to kill the hostages seized at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. Or the planes could hit the oil-refining and shipping facilities on Kharg Island; that would damage the Iranian economy but cause minimum loss of life.

Either blow would be an act of war that could intensify the lethal Middle East cycle of terrorism, retaliation and counterretaliation. Non-Government analysts fear Iran would take American lives in revenge, and not just in the Middle East. "If we hit Iran, there is certain to be terrorism in the U.S.," says Robert Kupperman, co-author of the respected book Terrorism: Threat, Reality, Response. There are thousands of Iranians in the U.S., Kupperman notes, and the Ayatullah Khomeini has among them "a network in place which could respond almost immediately."

But there could also be serious danger in not retaliating. Experts note apprehensively that terrorist attacks, airplane hijackings in particular, tend to come in clusters. A new wave of unpunished terrorism could frighten Arab moderates enough to destroy all prospect of peace negotiations with Israel; that indeed may be the terrorists' aim. Moreover, American lives are already in peril: Brian Jenkins, a Rand Corp. expert, estimates that about a third of all terrorist attacks involve Americans, more than involve the citizens of any other country. Analysts have worried in the past about the U.S.'s acquiring a reputation among terrorists and governments that support them as a target that can be struck with impunity, and the latest hijacking could reinforce that view. A weekend caller to Western news offices in Beirut bragged that the hijacking proved that Islamic Jihad could strike against "U.S. imperialism" at will.

Within the Administration, a debate about retaliation has been percolating for about a year. In a landmark speech last October, Shultz insisted that the U.S. "must be willing to use military force." He said it was appropriate even if "there is potential for loss of life of some of our fighting men and the loss of life of some innocent people" and even if the Government lacks "the kind of evidence that can stand up in an American court of law" as to who was responsible for a terrorist attack. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger has implied that retaliation should not be launched if those responsible for terrorist attacks could not be pinpointed. He once likened such counterstrikes to firing a gun into a crowded theater in the hope of hitting the guilty. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane undertook to reconcile the two views and in March produced an eight-point policy statement weighted toward Shultz's position; essentially, it called for limited retaliation. Over the weekend, Weinberger refused to rule out that option in the case of the hijacking.

Military strikes are not the only recourse. Economic sanctions against Iran, Syria, Libya or other states that abet terrorism are another option, but to be effective they probably would require concerted action by the U.S. and its allies, which is difficult to arrange. Sanctions, said Shultz in his October speech, "can help to isolate, weaken or punish states that sponsor terrorism." But, he added, U.S. allies "too often . . . are inhibited by fear of losing commercial opportunities or fear of provoking a bully." Though many analysts believe that sanctions eventually helped persuade Iran to release the hostages seized in 1979, that was a special case: Iran had billions of dollars in assets in the U.S. that Washington could and did freeze. Terrorism Expert David Hubbard, author of The Skyjacker: His Flights of Fancy, views covert action, including even assassination of terrorist leaders, as preferable to open military strikes. Jenkins vehemently disagrees, asserting, "We have no business hiring our version of Carlos (a celebrated Latin-American terrorist) or matching terrorists car bomb for car bomb." Any retaliation, he says, "ought to be done by legitimately constituted armed forces of our nation, with a clear, unambiguous message as to who did it and why we did it." Kupperman would prefer either economic sanctions or covert action to an open military strike but adds that if one is launched anyway, "it should be undertaken as quickly as possible to underline the link between the hijacking and the response."

It is possible, of course, that the Administration will decide that such open blows would be an inappropriate or ineffective response to the hijacking. That would raise the questions: If not now, when? And if the latest hijacking does not provoke U.S. retaliation, what would?

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke/Los Angeles and Bruce van Voorst/ Washington