The Dilemma of Retaliation

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.