Word: itely
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Acting as a kind of terrorist talk-show host was Ali Hamdan, a well-groomed representative of the Lebanese Amal, the mainstream Shi'ite faction that had in effect hijacked the hostages from their original hijackers, the two brutal gunmen who had seized TWA's Flight 847 and murdered Navy Diver Robert Stethem. The only glitch in this presentation occurred when reporters and cameramen got into a shoving match as they jockeyed for position. Quickly, the Shi'ite guards hustled their prizes from the crowded room in the Beirut airport, waving pistols and cuffing a few reporters for good measure...
...thrall by the spectacle of Americans turned into political pawns in a distant land. Only at the weekend did there appear to be the slightest sign of a possible breakthrough. Meeting on Sunday, the Israeli Cabinet decided to free 31 of the 776 Lebanese detainees, most of them Shi'ites, currently held in Atlit prison, south of Haifa. The gesture was quickly dismissed by Shi'ite leaders in Beirut as inadequate, but it could conceivably help ease the impasse...
...unable to use force, the U.S. turned to indirect diplomacy. Late in the first day of the crisis Reagan secretly cabled Syrian President Hafez Assad and asked him to use his influence to free the hostages or at least keep them alive. Though the Damascus regime has harbored Shi'ite extremists in terrorist camps in Baalbek, a city in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, Assad is known to want to contain Shi'ite terror, as he takes his turn at trying to pacify Lebanon. His response to the U.S. request, according to Administration aides, was "positive." Assad is believed to have...
...asked the Wall Street Journal. "We should give him the incentive to do so" -- by bombing Syrian military targets. Nonetheless, the degree of control exercised by Iran and Syria is a matter of dispute in intelligence circles. Some experts feel that both countries have lately sought to restrain Shi'ite fanatics. This impression is reinforced by Assad's apparent cooperation last week and Iran's refusal to support the TWA hijackers, much less allow them to land in Tehran...
Lashing out at a target, almost any target, would serve at least one purpose. It would be cathartic. For a nation seemingly humiliated, for a people fed up with too much talk and too little action, dropping a bomb on Baalbek or shooting a few Shi'ite fanatics would be grimly satisfying. Yet for policymakers the ultimate goal must be not simply to avenge terrorism but to stop it. Doing nothing, it seems certain, invites more atrocities. Yet force often begets force. For Ronald Reagan, the hard question is whether retaliating against terrorists will deter terrorism -- or only provoke more...