COLUMN ONE : Hostages: A Weapon of the Ages : Captives have been taken for political ransom since Caesar’s time. The tactic today is not unique to the Mideast, but stakes there have always been high.

Although Saddam Hussein’s detention of 12,000 Westerners in Iraq and Kuwait is without numerical precedent, hostage-taking is one of the oldest tools of warfare, dating back more than 2,000 years.

Julius Caesar was held hostage by pirates in 75 BC, before ransoming himself and returning to crucify his captors. In the 12th Century, the archduke of Austria and the German emperor held King Richard I of England hostage in a Rhine castle, finally releasing him for a “king’s ransom” and a pledge of allegiance.

And in 1795, the U.S. Congress paid a ransom of $1 million--one-sixth of the entire federal budget--to gain the release of 115 American sailors held hostage by Barbary pirates in North Africa. Twenty years later, Congress declared war against the dey, or ruler, of Algiers to gain the release of 10 more sailors. The pasha gave up his captives when a U.S. squadron sailed into his harbor.

To many Americans today, the image of fellow citizens being held hostage cuts to the marrow of national pride and recalls the feeling of helplessness engendered by the 1979-81 crisis involving American hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Carrying an American passport is now often a liability rather than a guarantee of safety, and with 2 million Americans working abroad, the rules of the game have changed permanently.

“Hostages have become a way of life,” Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Sunday.

Hostage-taking is not unique to the Middle East, however, and from Bolivia to Malaysia, from El Salvador to the Philippines, Americans have been taken captive in recent years by terrorists demanding everything from the resignation of the U.S. President to the release from prison of other terrorists, says Karen Gardela, head of the terrorism data base at RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. Nor are Americans the only ones who are stalked by hostage-takers these days: More than 130 foreigners from 21 nations have been taken captive in Lebanon alone since 1982.

But in the Middle East the stakes have always been high, and Saddam Hussein has raised the ante greatly, well aware that hostage situations crippled two American presidents in varying degrees and that the current situation presents President Bush with the wrenching necessity of trying to balance foreign policy with the need to protect American lives.

Americans abroad have taken increased security precautions for years, particularly in the Middle East and Latin America, but the American targets are so limitless now that hostile groups have found hostage-taking to be their most cost-efficient weapon--indeed, often their only weapon--in facing more powerful nations. Although terrorism may seldom achieve long-range nationalistic goals, it has become an equalizer.

Because Western democracies place such a high value on the lives of individual citizens, they are particularly vulnerable to terrorist attack. And because America’s foreign policy--as well as its economic and military strength--extends to every corner of the globe, there is virtually nowhere that some group or government does not take issue with U.S. goals. To terrorists, American civilians are the easiest “soft” target to strike in an attempt to alter U.S. policies.

In Lebanon, holding hostages has been an investment whose value may grow as the victims’ governments try to gain their release. West Germany, South Korea and France have all paid handsomely to buy freedom for their citizens. “Hostage-taking is like buying futures,” one terrorism expert says. However, in the case of the 3,000 Americans being held in Kuwait and Iraq, buying the hostages’ freedom doesn’t appear to be an option; and because of the numbers involved, President Bush doesn’t have the same choices that Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had.

“In previous hostage situations, such as in Iran 10 years ago, the question was, ‘Was the United States willing to go to war in an effort to bring its people home?’ and the answer was, ‘No,’ ” says Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert who is managing director of Kroll Associates, a Los Angeles-based international consulting firm that specializes in corporate security and risk analysis.

“This situation is very different from Iran because the United States has already indicated its willingness to go to war against Iraq. So I don’t see how taking the hostages can be effective for Saddam, except by creating distraction and trying to erode the solidarity of the world by releasing some nations’ hostages and not others.”

The situation also differs from some others with which Washington has grappled because in Iraq and Kuwait there are no friendly forces to render assistance. When, for instance, Bolivian guerrillas held 52 people, including Americans, hostage for more than two days in 1981, they threatened to blow up a local refinery associated with Occidental Petroleum unless President Reagan resigned. All the hostages were safely freed after Bolivian soldiers stormed the terrorists’ stronghold.

In the earlier days of hostage-taking, the terrorists’ primary goals were to discredit local governments, win regional concessions or call attention to their cause. The 1978 abduction and murder in Italy of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and, in the same country, the 1981 kidnaping of U.S. Brig. Gen. James L. Dozier (who was later freed in a raid by Italian carabinieri ) fell into this category. Even the early hijackings of airliners by the Palestine Liberation Organization--some of which included brief hostage situations--were intended to pressure Israel.

But the goals changed with hostage-taking in Iran, Lebanon and now Kuwait and Iraq. Today the goal is to sway the foreign policies of the world’s major powers. The hostage crisis in Iran was about ideology. However painful the moment was for America, it was, as Judith Kipper of the Brookings Institution pointed out, one that Washington could still buy its way out of with money, favors or assurances.

With Iraq, ideology is not at stake. At issue instead are the ambitions and pride of a military dictator who has shown himself willing to go to any extremes to fulfill his goals.

Given the failure of two U.S. presidents to deal successfully with hostage crises, and considering the huge foreign community in Kuwait and Iraq, President Bush is facing what could become a personal exigency. He cannot, political analysts say, afford to appear indecisive or weak in what looks like the most serious challenge to U.S. interests since the Cold War ended.

Although public opinion polls indicate high support for the deployment of U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia, enthusiasm could flag if the confrontation is allowed to drag on for months or even years, as seems to happen with most disputes in the Middle East. If world support, particularly that of Arab states, begins drifting away, the United States would find itself in the dangerous position of standing alone in the Middle East as the sole protector of Western interests.

“Once Saddam Hussein took Kuwait, it was predictable that he would take the hostages, too,” says Brookings’ Kipper. “Now that he’s got them, he’s not susceptible to favors and assurances. He wants the 100% of what he’s got. Saddam is fearless, tremendously courageous, very smart. He’s calculated this very well. He’s not someone who’s going to back down.

“Remember, we went over there with three things in mind: Protect Saudi Arabia, get a rollback of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and the recognition that we can’t live with Saddam Hussein, who will have the potential for nuclear capabilities in a few years and be the leader of an economic superpower by the end of the decade. The balances in the gulf were distorted when Iran left the equation, and since we can’t ask for Iran’s help in defeating Iraq, we are truly in a fix.”

In taking the hostages, Hussein may be playing for time, looking for a weapon that will erode U.S. public support. Surely he remembers how firm President Reagan’s commitment to Lebanon was--and how quickly Reagan withdrew the forces after 241 U.S. servicemen were killed in an attack on their barracks in 1983. The Iraqi president is a man of great patience, a virtue that he is confident is not shared by the American body politic.

Whatever the outcome of the hostages’ fate, Saddam Hussein--a man Washington supported in the later stages of his eight-year war against Iran--has raised the stakes and perhaps changed the shape of future international conflicts.

“This crisis marks the institutionalization of hostage-taking as an instrument of modern war,” says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist at the RAND Corp.

“It’s a shield issue now, which makes it harder to get the hostages back. There’s no demand that can be agreed to to get Saddam to back down. Even if it were a realistic option and we left the gulf, why should Saddam give up the hostages as the guarantee that we won’t come back?

“Americans are really tired of the Middle East in general, the unhappy experiences we’ve had there, and they’re very tired of hostages,” Hoffman says. “We’re drained.

“All the hostage problems we’ve had over the past 10 years have been exponentially increased with this crisis. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been, and so are the dilemmas we face.

“Even if we could get them, there are more hostages than there are members of Delta Force. You’re not talking about a rescue raid, but a mass commando strike.

“If there’s action, there will have to be an international consensus, since any attempt to rescue one nationality would endanger other nationalities.”