The hostage scenario has become numbingly familiar. The sadistic videotapes of frightened captives, followed by threats of execution. The White House dispatching naval fleets or listening for some faint reply down a clogged diplomatic channel to the Middle East. Last week it was George Bush's turn to try urgent appeals and gunboat maneuvers while an angry public fulminated at American impotence. Just six months in office, Bush had become the third U.S. President in a row caught in the same wretched predicament. The latest hostage crisis, however, yielded a gruesome new image of horror: a man, bound and gagged, dangling from a makeshift scaffold.
The hanging man was almost certainly U.S. Marine Lieut. Colonel William Higgins, 44, who was kidnaped last year while serving as head of an observer team attached to the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon. His captors claimed they killed him in retaliation for Israel's seizure of Sheik Abdul Karim Obeid, a presumed leader of Shi'ite Hizballah terrorists, during a raid into southern Lebanon. U.S. officials now believe, however, that Higgins had been dead for some time, then used for his kidnapers' macabre display. No matter which terrible theory turns out to be true, the image of Higgins' body was a brutal reminder that, ten years after the seizure of hostages at the American embassy in Tehran, the U.S. still lacks any truly effective means for dealing with terrorist kidnapings.
The grueling events of the week put strains on U.S.-Israeli relations over the question of whether Israel had recklessly endangered the lives of Americans. To the Israelis, at least, aggressiveness was clearly preferable to the unbudging status quo that the U.S. appears to tolerate in the unending hostage dilemma. All week the White House navigated between the same poles of military threat and diplomatic engagement that earlier Administrations had tried. Yet by week's end there was a tantalizing glimpse of flexibility: Iran's new President, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, offered to "help" find a solution to the hostage problem, thus raising the hope that Bush will not be boxed in by the implacable hostility of Iran as his predecessors were during the reign of the late Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Nothing better illustrated the endlessness of the hostage dilemma than the threat that Joseph Cicippio would quickly succeed Higgins as the next dangling man. No sooner had the videotape of Higgins' body been released to news agencies in Beirut than a countdown began toward the execution of Cicippio, 58, kidnaped three years ago from the campus of the American University of Beirut. Cicippio's last-minute reprieve was accompanied by a threat that the clock could be set ticking again. His captors demanded that Israel free not only Obeid but also unspecified Palestinians and Lebanese guerrillas. "Acceptance should be announced within days," they added. "Otherwise the initiative will be considered canceled."