Hostage to hostages.

Hostage to Hostages

WITH THE MOST recent kidnapping of Americansin Beirut, the time has come to make some distinctions.

For 12 years, all the multitudinous religious andethnic groups of Lebanon have been at each other's throats. Perhaps the most civilized of the lot are the Christians, many of them Eastern-rite Catholics, though they are not above the occasional gangland rubout. Then there are Moslems, both Sunnis and Shiites. In the Chouf mountains, finally, live the Druses, who believe that the sixth Fatimite caliph (d. 1021) was God. To aid themselves in their battles, these groups have made a shifting series of alliances with Syrians, Iranians, Israelis, the PLO, and each other.

The situation, in other words, is as complicated andas bloody as the business affairs of Al Capone, and an American who at this point chooses to remain in the middle is asking for it.

These kidnappings are qualitatively different fromprevious terrorist acts. When the Iranians overran the American Embassy and held half a hundred Americans prisoner, that was an act of war. When hijackers beat Robert Stethem to death and threw the crippled Leon Klinghoffer overboard, those were also smallscale acts of war. About the only criticism to make of the retaliatory bombing of Libya was that it didn't get the colonel himself.

Perhaps some way can be found to carry out anexemplary punishment of the Islamic Holy War, or the Party of God Knows What, or whoever is responsible. If so, then the Administration should do it. But that won't "solve" the Lebanese problem. All the Americans left in Beirut should get out now.