Stench in France

Four days before France’s presidential election Jacques Chirac, premier and candidate for president, was able to announce at an election rally that three Frenchmen held captive by pro-Iranian Lebanese terrorists had been set free. No sooner did the heartfelt applause that greeted this news subside, however, than the skeptical questioning began. Apparently almost no one in France accepts that the release of the hostages, two diplomats and a journalist, came either cost-free or without connection to Chirac’s political ambitions. Chirac denies that any ransom was paid or any corrupt bargain struck. But hanging over this whole affair is the odor, the stench even, of a deal cut with terrorists.

That smell is of course not unknown in this country, thanks to the Reagan Administration’s own naive, inept, self-deluding and nationally humiliating efforts of a few years ago to buy freedom for American captives in Lebanon by supplying American arms to Iran. It will probably be a while before the full measure of the payoffs made by France to the Lebanese terrorists and the government of Iran become known. An aide to Chirac concedes that something more than $300 million will soon be repaid on a loan obtained from the shah’s pre-revolutionary government. In addition it seems probable that diplomatic relations between Paris and Tehran, broken off nearly two years ago, are to be reestablished at an early date.

For the rest, there is for now only plausible speculation: about a cash ransom paid to the Lebanese kidnapers, about generous treatment for a would-be Iranian assassin jailed in France, about a shift in French arms sales to Iraq and Iran, even about a reduction in France’s naval presence in the Persian Gulf.

With all this, the consensus among French political analysts is that Chirac will still lose substantially to President Francois Mitterrand in Sunday’s voting. Chirac, though, won’t be the only loser. France is diminished as well by the agreement that its premier reached, because by demonstrating again a craven willingness to pay tribute to the terrorists of Lebanon and their sponsors in Iran, its government has taken another step toward ensuring that at some point more hostages will be seized, more demands will be raised, more pain will be inflicted.

It is a terrible thing when innocent people are made prisoners in terroristic power games, when they are abused and even killed. But it is a far worse thing when the leaders of great countries--France, or the United States, or any other--try to pretend that in rewarding terrorism they are not inevitably ensuring that more innocent people will be made to suffer.