The report issued Tuesday on the Pan Am bombing was a typical Washington effort - parts of it eminently sensible, parts deeply silly.
The silly bits were pretty egregious. The commission says the United States should consider air strikes against terrorists - and covert operations where they're too difficult. Does that mean bombing Syria or Iran?The commission doesn't go that far - which rather obviates the whole point of their argument. But that must be what they had in mind.
So let's take it from the top. The best estimate of who was responsible for bombing Pan Am flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988, is Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Jibril works out of Syria, and it is most improbable that so important an action would have been carried out without the knowledge of the Syrian intelligence agencies.
Why did he do it? Once again, no one is sure, but the best guess is that he was hired by Iranians to avenge the 290 people on board an Iranian airliner shot down by the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes on July 3, 1988.
Which Iranians? Impossible to say, and it's quite likely that the government was not involved. There are plenty of free-lance terrorists on the fringes of power in Tehran and in Lebanon.
So what would happen if the United States tried to bomb Jibril? One guess is more tit for tat. Another, not a guess at all, is that the terrorism would continue. The United States tried it once, and the Israelis have been bombing Arab terrorist bases in Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia and in Libya for years without any success.
Indeed, on Dec. 9, 1988, 12 days before Flight 103, Israel bombed Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC headquarters near Beirut, killing 20 people.
That didn't deter his bombers, if they were his bombers. (That raid didn't provoke the Pan Am bombing - it must have been planned months, not days, in advance.)
The United States tried tit for tat on one notable occasion in 1986 when terrorists bombed a disco in Berlin frequented by U.S. military men. The United States bombed Libya - they missed Col. Gadhafi, killing his adopted daughter instead. Thereupon, three hostages in Lebanon and a U.S. diplomat in Sudan were murdered. Tit for tat.
It doesn't deter, and it doesn't prevent. Proposing it now is mindless demagoguery. The report says, "National will - and the moral courage to use it - is the ultimate means to defeat terrorism." Such fatuous nonsense starts wars.
So what about the remaining hostages? The only way to get them out is to enlist the cooperation of Iran and Syria - and, indeed, after two hostages were recently released, President Bush publicly thanked President Assad of Syria for his help. This is the man, remember, who shelters the people responsible for the Pan Am bombing.
It's distasteful to deal with Assad but necessary if we want to rescue the hostages. It's also necessary if we want to get Assad to close down the PFLP-GC. It happens that Syria is more vulnerable than Iran or Iraq (it has no oil), so it's worth trying. Bombing Syria because it harbors Ahmed Jibril will only get more people killed - perhaps including hostages.
There was one other suggestion of the burn `em, hang `em variety: use covert operations against terrorists. Does that mean assassinations? Obviously it does. But perhaps the commission forgot that's against the law. It was banned after the Rockefeller Commission discovered the number of times the CIA had tried to kill Fidel Castro with exploding seashells or by hiring mobsters.
What about the sensible suggestions? Some are so fundamental that it's astonishing they haven't been done months ago. Make the federal government responsible for airport security in the United States. Make the State Department responsible for supervising security by U.S. airlines abroad; don't leave it to a bunch of amateurs working for the airlines.
The danger is that these sensible suggestions will be forgotten in the yelling and screaming over the tit-for-tat brigade.