COLUMN ONE : Iraq Flouts Embassy Rule Book : The Baghdad government’s treatment of foreign missions and diplomats underscores its defiance toward international protocol.

As darkness fell in Washington on Dec. 7, 1941, a crowd gathered outside the Japanese Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Inside, diplomats grew so worried that they called a private detective agency seeking protection. But even on this day of infamy, the Japanese need not have worried.

The FBI soon arrived to throw a protective shield around the embassy, and ultimately the United States saw that the embassy staff members were returned safely to their homeland.

But the kid glove treatment given to the Japanese--and generally accorded to the diplomats of all belligerents in World War II, mortal as that conflict was--stands in stark contrast with the way Iraq has dealt with Western embassies and personnel in its invasion of Kuwait.

Saddam Hussein’s roughshod ride over the conventions that are supposed to protect diplomats is seemingly only the latest outrage in a modern era that has seen attack after attack upon embassies and their personnel. But even in a 20-year catalogue of such violations of international law, Hussein’s stands apart: It is unabashedly the responsibility of his government, not the action of terrorists nor even of a government acting as cover for a mob.

The customs and precedents being shattered here date back to antiquity. Even in ancient Greece, while the Peloponnesian War raged at its height, the enemy city-states of Sparta and Athens disciplined themselves to respect the rights and safety of their respective emissaries.

The rules, scholars say, evolved very early in the relations between antagonistic societies for one overriding reason: enlightened self-interest.

In the bitterest of disputes between countries, says international legal scholar Michael J. Glennon of UC Davis, “they felt it was important sometimes to be able to talk peace.”

Defying international rules, Hussein’s troops have surrounded the American and other foreign embassies in Kuwait, threatening the freedom of movement guaranteed to diplomats. They have shut off water and electricity to many of these embassies, leaving them in what amounts to a state of siege.

When scores of American and other foreign diplomats and their families left Kuwait with promises of safe passage for destinations abroad, Iraqi authorities reneged on their earlier pledges. They held the male diplomats in Baghdad and turned back three male dependents from the Turkish border.

And perhaps most ominous of all, by holding diplomats inside Iraq while at the same time positioning other Americans around potential military targets as human shields, Hussein has suggested that the U.S. diplomats may be denied their most elemental right--to be sent home safe and sound if hostilities break out.

Why has Iraq flouted the seeming wisdom of centuries? Analysts link its actions to the evolving tactics of terrorists over the past decade and, most particularly, to the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Other nations condemned the Iranian takeover of the embassy and the imprisonment of more than 50 Americans as hostages. But by defying “Uncle Satan,” the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini strengthed his hold on Iran’s Muslim masses--and got away with it.

“Iran did not become a pariah among nations,” points out Bruce Fein, a Washington-based specialist in international law, “and Saddam Hussein profited from their example.”

Even so, the siege of the embassies in Kuwait city is singular. The taking of the Tehran embassy was perpetrated by extremist Iranian rebels for whose conduct the Iranian government admitted no responsibility. Saddam Hussein, by contrast, has made no bones about the fact that the full weight of his regime is behind the move to force embassies in Kuwait to shut down and thus tacitly accept the Iraqi conquest.

That means Hussein is denying that such embassy personnel are diplomats at all.

While governments frequently expel one another’s diplomats--and Washington did exactly that to some Iraqi envoys in Washington on Monday--such actions involve governments that recognize each other as legal governments. In the case of Baghdad’s treatment of envoys in Kuwait, the United States and others do not recognize the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as the basis for a legitimate government.

For both sides in the imbroglio over the Kuwait embassies, the stakes are high. By forcing the shutdown of these foreign outposts, Hussein hopes to gain legitimacy for his conquest of the tiny oil-rich country. By maintaining the presence of their diplomats in Kuwait city despite the invasion, the United States and other foreign powers hope to deny him just that legitimacy.

But this 1990 power struggle is being played out on a field delineated by diplomatic customs and privileges rooted in an era when monarchs still ruled most of the world and their envoys were considered to be their personal representatives.

So sensitive were such governments about the proper treatment of their emissaries that, in 1761, a dispute between the French and Spanish ambassadors over whose coach should head the procession at a public ceremony in London led to gunfire and the threat of war between the two countries.

The emphasis on such pomp and protocol diminished in time as republics replaced monarchies. But the fundamental principles governing discourse among nations and the rights of their legal representatives carried through that era and into the 20th Century.

Probably the most important of these is extraterritoriality, the rule by which a nation’s embassy is considered to be part of its own territory and its ambassador and other embassy personnel are shielded from all interference, including criminal prosecution by local authorities.

These traditions and customs were strained by World War II, when the Axis and Allied powers were pledged to bring about each other’s destruction. Yet for the most part they survived intact.

For example, although Americans regarded the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor as one of the worst acts of perfidy in history, Saburo Kurusu and Kichisaboro Nomura, Tokyo’s chief envoys in the negotiations that preceded the “sneak attack,” were moved out of Washington for safekeeping to the Homestead, a luxurious resort in Hot Springs, Va.--along with other Japanese Embassy personnel.

They were later returned to the Land of the Rising Sun in exchange for U.S. diplomats who had been interned by the Japanese.

Much the same procedure was followed for German and Italian diplomats who were lodged in similarly plush accommodations at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va.

In that case, antagonisms between the supposed Axis allies mounted so sharply that, according to David Brinkley’s best seller, “Washington Goes to War,” the State Department was forced to separate the two, dispatching the Italians--along with some Hungarians--to another mountain resort in North Carolina.

The arrival of peace and the establishment of the United Nations seemed to bolster hopes for strengthened support for the rules of diplomacy and for respect for international law in general.

Even the bitter and dangerous rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union could not entirely dim these prospects. And in 1961 the traditions that had long governed diplomacy were codified in the Treaty of Vienna, an accord since ratified by more than 100 nations, including the United States and Iraq.

But this rule of international reason soon confronted another threat, in its way even more insidious and dangerous than the Cold War. This was the rise of terrorism. Seeking prominent targets whose fate would serve to dramatize a vast array of alleged injustices and grievances, terrorists began turning on the world’s diplomats.

During the 20 years from 1970 to 1989, more than 1,700 diplomats were the targets of terrorist attacks around the world, according to the RAND Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank. More than a third of them were U.S. State Department personnel.

Washington met this escalating danger with sometimes-Draconian security measures that turned embassies into fortresses, imposed unaccustomed restrictions on the activities of diplomats and sometimes seriously lowered their morale.

Yet these heightened precautions were not enough to prevent the seizure of the Tehran embassy in 1979 or the bombing of the new U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1984--less than a year after the first embassy and a Marine compound were blown up in 1983, with the loss of hundreds of lives.

As far as the sanctity of diplomats and their embassies is concerned, the attacks in Beirut were the work of political terrorist organizations, not the official actions of governments--as is the case now in Kuwait and Iraq.

Terrorism posed another sort of problem for the British in 1984, when a crowd demonstrating against the Libyan regime of Moammar Kadafi was raked by automatic fire from within the Libyan Embassy, killing a young policewoman and wounding 10 people.

British police cordoned off the building, but the rules of the Vienna Treaty on diplomatic immunity kept them from storming the building. Meanwhile, the Libyans backed the diplomatic code with the threat of force, surrounding the British Embassy in Tripoli.

The impasse lasted for 11 days and was only resolved by an arrangement under which the two countries broke off diplomatic relations and evacuated their embassies. Among the 30 Libyans who were deported from Britain, authorities were certain, was the gunman who had fired the fatal shot.

A century earlier, the rule of inviolability that shielded the Libyan sniper allowed the imperial Chinese Embassy in London to keep revolutionary leader Sun Yat Sen imprisoned in an attic room for an extended period--until repeated British demands led to his release.

The same rule allows individuals to seek political asylum in a foreign embassy. One prominent example was Cardinal Josef Mindszenty of Hungary. He was protected from the hostile Communist regime in his own country within the U.S. Embassy in Budapest for more than a decade starting in 1956.

The United States found the rule of asylum turned against its immediate interests last year when, after the invasion of Panama, that country’s strongman, Manuel A. Noriega, took refuge in the papal nunciature.

During Noriega’s stay, U.S. troops outside the embassy played loud music over a public address system. According to Glennon, of UC Davis, that made them technically guilty of violating the rule guaranteeing the peace of the embassy.

At any rate, after 10 days, Noriega left the nunciature and surrendered to U.S. authorities.

Though diplomatic immunity, like the rest of international law, is based on lofty principle, its effectiveness and enforcement depend on down-to-earth practical considerations: A host country treats foreign diplomats according to the code to protect the interests of its own emissaries abroad.

This principle of reciprocity was demonstrated in 1982, when the city of Glen Cove, N.Y., sought to keep Soviet diplomats attached to the United Nations from using the Long Island community’s beaches and parks, claiming the Soviets were conducting espionage. Moscow retaliated by barring American diplomats from a beach on the Moscow River.

The U.S. Justice Department then went to court seeking an order to force Glen Cove to lift its ban and, after a two-year legal battle, the City Council reversed itself.

Though most international specialists believe the United States is on solid ground in its present dispute with Iraq, some point out that in other cases, Washington has itself been charged with violating aspects of international law, in such actions as the invasions of Grenada and Panama and the mining of Nicaraguan waters in 1984.

Many Americans dismiss such criticism. They argue that other powers, notably the Soviet Union and China and many Third World countries, pay attention to rules for international behavior only when it suits their convenience.

But proponents of a stricter compliance with international law contend that it is in the United States’ own interest to adhere faithfully to such principles.

“When America accepts this responsibility, we enhance our leadership in the world community,” wrote Mathew Nimetz, who was a State Department official in the Carter Administration.

Times researchers Aleta Embrey and Abebe Gessesse contributed to this story.