Nation: The U.S. and the Skyjackers: Where Power is Vulnerable

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ALL week the nation fixed its agonized attention on Qa Khanna, the stretch of Jordanian desert where three hijacked airliners rested improbably, like a mirage of beached whales. The piracies represented an oddly terrifying juxtaposition of technology and barbarism, an almost science-fiction quality of civilization in a retrograde time machine, stranded abruptly in a desert waste. A handful of fanatics, equipped with nothing more complex than guns, dynamite and airline schedules, rendered some of the most advanced nations impotent to protect several hundred of their citizens (see THE WORLD). In one violent drama, the guerrillas frustrated the most sophisticated diplomacy and further endangered the already parlous chances for peace in the Middle East. After six days of waiting on the desert, the hijackers evacuated their hostages from the planes and then blew up $25 million worth of aircraft, in many ways the symbols of wealth and advanced technology.

There was an intimation that the world's most elaborate systems were vulnerable sometimes in proportion to their complexity. The specific problem of hijacking might be reduced, but the larger threat suggested by last week's piracies remained. Small groups can tyrannize simply by finding a pressure point. The older metaphors for societies —the ship of state, the political machine —should perhaps be replaced. More apt would be a neurological or organic comparison, what Columbia's Zbigniew Brzezinski calls "the global nervous system," in which revolutionaries can cause not massive onslaughts but small and devastating aneurysms.

In earlier, prenuclear times, American

Presidents responded to such depredations with fleets, Marines and righteous cannon fire—as when Thomas Jefferson dispatched U.S. frigates under Stephen Decatur to clean out the Barbary pirates who menaced American trade in the Mediterranean. Wistfully truculent, California's Governor Ronald Reagan complained last week: "It used to be that an American could simply pin a little American flag on him and be safe even in the midst of a revolution in some other country, because the world knew that this country would go any place in the world to get back any citizen of ours." Richard Nixon argued during the 1968 campaign: "When respect for the United States falls so low that a fourth-rate military power like North Korea will seize an American naval vessel on the high seas, it is time for new leadership." Last week Nixon was involved in an operation more intricate and hazardous than political campaigning.

No Force. The President was looking forward to the last day of his San Clemente vacation when word of the first two hijackings arrived. Flying back to Washington in Air Force One, Nixon received another bulletin. Pan Am's hijacked 747 had been blown up on the tarmac in Cairo. The President's immediate reaction: "Were the people out of it?"