Bush Word Choice Sends Dark Signal

By using the previously taboo word hostages, President Bush has for the first time acknowledged to the American public that the United States could face a grim, long-term standoff with Iraq, one that revives unhappy memories of earlier U.S. showdowns in Iran and Lebanon.

But if the approximately 3,000 Americans inside Iraq and Kuwait are in fact all held hostage, then the scale of this crisis dwarfs that of either of these previous two hostage episodes, which brought down one presidency and threatened another.

Until Monday, the United States had avoided using the word hostage in the hope that it might leave Iraq enough leeway to negotiate the release of the Americans being kept inside Iraq and Kuwait. Over the weekend, U.S. diplomats in both Iraq and Kuwait met repeatedly with high-level Iraqi authorities in an attempt to find some quick way of winning the freedom of the Americans inside the two countries.

Now, terrorism experts say Bush’s description of the Americans as hostages represents a gloomy signal that diplomatic efforts to resolve their plight have broken down, and that the President may be seeking to build a framework to support retaliatory action.

“They still need to build public support for this operation, and this is going to be an additional element in rallying that support,” says Neil C. Livingstone , a private consultant who specializes in counterterrorism.

The use of the word hostages has other foreign-policy implications as well. Throughout the past nine years of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, the formal, oft-proclaimed U.S. policy has been to refuse to enter into any negotiations concerning the release of American hostages, because doing so might set a precedent.

“I’m not going to do anything that would put some other American, perhaps in some other place at some other time, at risk, and that means trading off or negotiating for hostages,” Bush said at a press conference last year when speaking of the Americans still being held hostage in Lebanon. “ . . . My view is to do nothing that will be seen as quid pro quo for hostages.”

Although Bush has held fast, at least until now, on the refusal to negotiate for the release of hostages, he has sometimes fudged the issue.

“We will talk to anyone, any group, any country about the safety and well-being of Americans,” he said at one point during his 1988 presidential campaign. He apparently draws a distinction between merely “talking” and “negotiating.”

Now, the President faces the unhappy prospect of either abandoning the longstanding U.S. policy on hostages or refusing to enter into further negotiations with Iraq about the release of the Americans.

Asked Monday whether the general U.S. policy of refusing to negotiate for hostages remains in effect, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher replied, “I’ll have to check on how to answer that.” At the end of the day, Boucher still had no answer.

Bush’s acknowledgement that the Americans are hostages was no casual slip of the tongue. The President had met with his top foreign policy advisers to review the Middle East situation late Sunday, and he used the sensitive word hostages during a formal, prepared speech Monday morning to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Only five days earlier, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler had insisted that the Americans should not be labelled hostages.

“There have been no demands made on these people,” she said last Wednesday. “These people are not bound and gagged.”

But Monday, in a reversal of course, the State Department told reporters the Americans in Iraq and Kuwait should be called hostages because, in Boucher’s words, “Iraq has put forth essentially political conditions for their departure.”

To some extent, experts said, the change is merely one of semantics.

“This doesn’t change very much,” said Livingstone. “What it is is recognition of what was feared for two weeks but no one wanted to officially acknowledge.”

At the same time, analysts said, the new language from the Administration is designed as a blunt new warning to Iraqi officials that the United States is prepared to retaliate for their actions with both legal and military means.

“The policy value is the statement to Saddam Hussein that if these people are abused, lots of trouble is to follow,” said Robert Kupperman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Noel Koch, a former top-ranking Pentagon official for counterterrorism, criticized the new Administration language, saying he was “frankly puzzled” to hear the President describe the Americans as hostages.

“At each step in this crisis, the President is putting the worst possible construction on the situation,” Koch said. “In the short term, that has the effect of getting the American public all riled up and behind the whole thing.

“But that kind of approach probably has a very short life span,” he said.

However, Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at Kroll Associates, a corporate security firm, in Los Angeles, attributed the change in the President’s language to an evolution in which the Iraqi government has now left little doubt about its reasons for detaining American citizens.

“The situation has changed,” Jenkins said, “and the word is being used correctly, in accordance with the ancient principle of using hostages as shields.”

While analysts expressed confidence that the new hostage atmosphere would help Bush build support for actions against Iraq, some noted that the President would have to take care to ensure that the Middle East crisis was not regarded as a hostage situation alone.

“The Administration cannot let the public look at this confrontation through the lens of a hostage situation,” Jenkins said, “because if all the Americans were to come home from Iraq and Kuwait, the troops would remain in Saudi Arabia.”