Friday, June 28, 1935
The Nebraskan
Page 5
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M
lostages are victims.of past inaction
i t l;i - 1 ....
arvelously. while Americans were
mesmerized by the worst terror
ism crisis since the last one and
until the next one, and the usual peo
ple were saying the usual things about
the need to understand the roots of
terrorism, the New York Times reported
that thanks to recent scholarship Nero
is now better understood than pre
viously, and that although no one is
saying he was nice (he murdered his
mother and slaughtered Jews and
Christians evenhandedly), he had his
virtues and his vices have explanations.
Mother was a pill; it was tough being
a teen-age emperor, he loved the arts;
literature flourished during his reign;
and evidence suggests he did not set,
let alone fiddle during the fire that
burned Rome. He killed his last victim,
himself, by suicide, 1,917 years ago.
Today he is more comprehensible with
out seeming less lurid.
And 1,917 years from now will be
soon enough to worry about "under
standing" the motivations of the terror
ists as though there is some mystery
about the religious and political
motives of their war against the West.
When one of these standard crises
begins (television news, like enter
tainment programming, seems to be in
summer re-runs), the air becomes thick
with the thought that understanding
the terrorists will make possible a the
rapeutic foreign doHpv
only practical task is to make terrorism
against Americans terrifying to those
(in this case, Syrians) who could, if
motivated, restrain it.
But already portions of the govern
ment are secreting the suggestion that
this time, too, retaliation would be
inappropriate. Why? Because it would
interfere with fine-tuning and nation
building in Lebanon. Here we go again.
Laeorge
Will
In Vietnam, the Droner task wsc tn
defeat aggression by North Vietnam's
army. But the displaced professoriat in
the U.S. government saw the problem
as "nation building." As a result, the
nation of South Vietnam no longer
exists. In the Middle East, the problem
is to make terrorism costly as opposed
to what it now is: it is rational, because
it is effective and risk-free. But today's
suggestion is that retaliation would
damage the standing of Nabih Berri,
who supposedly could be crucial to U.S.
influence among "moderates" in
Lebanon.
We are back in business at the old
stand nation building. In these
crises, the supposed "moderates" are
the terrorist negotiators (in Iran, Gotz-
badeh; in Lebanon now, Berri) to whom
consideration must allegedly be given
lest "extremists" prosper.
But U.S. policy should not be con
trolled by consideration for the likes of
Berri, who by his behavior is on the
terrorists side, and who by the evi
dence of recent history is just another
mayfly in a tornado.
Ronald Reagan has been so Mau
Maued by critics of his (quite imagi
nary) bellicosity, he seems unable to
make America as menacing as it should
be at moments like this. He should
remember the promise he made a week
after his inauguration, at the White
House ceremony for the freed hostages
from Iran: the promise of "swift and
effective retribution" for terrorism. If
there is no retaliation now, then from
now on, over all Reagan's words will
hover an asterisk denoting "these are
just words, probably empty and unre
lated to action."
For the moment, the administration
should just muzzle those officials who
are complaining because Israel is
reluctant to practice surrogate appease
ment for us. Then the administration
should fold its arms, shut its mouth
and wait. That will not be easy, given
the ecstasy with which the television
networks go about saturating the nation
with coverage of such episodes.
ABC's Peter Jennings says television
has "got to be very careful not to feed
the public anger." Have the networks
decided on the appropriate American
mood and their responsibility for fine
tuning it? Americans are not nearly
angry enough about the savage beating
and murder of the sailor who followed
Maj. Nicholson to Arlington Cemetery.
Intelligent behavior flows not from
keeping one's passional and rational
capacities separated, but from reason
ably relating a proper passion in
this case, cold fury to action.
It is getting late in the Third World
War for Americans to heed Douglas
MacArthur's warning that all military
failure is explicable in two words: "too
late." Too late perceiving, too late
responding to, threats. The President
says he does not want to jeopardize the
lives of today's hostages. He is too late.
.Today's hostages are, to some extent,
victims of yesterday's flaccid responses
by him to terrorism, emphatically includ
ing the non-response to the truck bomb
that blew U.S. forces out of Lebanon.
Under U.S. policy, the tragedy of ter
rorism resembles an operetta, Gilbert
and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Pen
zance," in which the police assigned to
deal with the pirates say, "Yes, yes, we
go...AU right we go," but what they
communicate is extreme reluctance.
1S35, Washington Post Writers Group
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