Popping Off

Syria is on President Reagan’s hit list. Damascus might be attacked if there is ironclad proof linking Syria to an act of terrorism. Iran is on the same list. So says the President, raising a whole string of unanswerable questions about American intentions just as the European allies are rooting out and expelling potential terrorists and closing police ranks as the United States wanted them to do.

It is hard to know whether Reagan was trying to make Syria nervous or whether he is newly aware that Syria is the most active sponsor of state terrorism in the world and that bombing Tripoli without threatening Damascus exposed the big holes in his terrorism policy.

Either way it was a foolish thing to say. There already is ironclad proof linking Syria to terrorism. Syrian-supported terrorists had held six Americans hostage for more than a year and recently killed one, librarian Peter Kilburn. Abu Nidal, who probably masterminded the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and may well have had a hand in attacks on passengers in airline terminals at Rome and Vienna during the Christmas holidays, has an office in Damascus and trains terrorists in two other regions of Syria.

But Syria also has 500 combat aircraft, many of top quality. Libya’s air force is puny by comparison. Libya’s Moammar Kadafi is a loudmouth with no standing in the Arab world. Syria’s Hafez Assad is a ruthless and crafty politician who is expanding his influence in the Middle East and doesn’t mind running strings of assassins and killing thousands of his own people, as he did in the Syrian city of Hama four years ago, to get what he wants. Syria has newer Soviet anti-aircraft missiles than Libya has. And the Soviet Union has much closer ties to Syria than to any other country in the Middle East.

One question raised by all of this is whether Reagan’s casual posting of a new hit list means that he is prepared to risk a superpower confrontation over one provable terrorist act. If so, that would mean that he has handed over to Syria the string that, if pulled, could unravel what little peace is left in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz hastened to add to the President’s remark that the United States has no “plans” to bomb Damascus or Tehran. As for Tripoli, he said, that proved only that America “will use its military power.”

But that revives the questions of whether supersonic bombers are any match for terrorists and whether bombing capitals simply increases the search for revenge that lies behind so many terrorist acts.

The President’s own commission on terrorism concluded that the most effective way for the West to combat terrorism was to keep doing what it was doing, only better--intensified police work, tighter coordination among countries that are targets.

Reagan said after the Tripoli attack that the bombing would not stop terrorism, only nudge the world closer to safety. By putting Damascus on a hit list, talking without thinking, he nudges the world in the other direction.